Mr Smith

AVILA COLLEGE

CARLOS T? T

MR. SMITE / BY LOUIS BKOMFIELD
BROMBIELD, LOUIS

FIC/B788MR

ACL000085696

DATE DUE

HOOLEY-8UNDSCHU UBRARY
AViLA COLLEGE

MR. SMITH

Books by Louis BROMFIELD

A MODERN HERO
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
AWAKE AND REHEARSE
THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS

ANNIE SPRAGG
A GOOD WOMAN
EARLY AUTUMN
POSSESSION f
THE GREEN BAY TREE
THE FARM
HERE TODAY AND GONE

TOMORROW
THE MAN WHO HAD

EVERYTHING
THE RAINS CAME
IT TAKES ALL KINDS

NIGHT IN BOMBAY
WILD IS THE RIVER
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
MRS. PARKINGTON

WHAT BECAME OF ANNA

BOLTON
THE WORLD WE

LIVE IN

PLEASANT VALLEY
A FEW BRASS TACKS
KENNY
COLORADO
MALABAR FARM
THE WILD COUNTRY
OUT OF THE EARTH
MR. SMITH

MR. SMITH

By Louis Bromfield

Hooiey-Sundschu Library
AVilA COLLEGE

HARPER BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS-NEW YORK

MR. SMITH

COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY LOUIS BROMFIELD
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ALL RIGHTS IN THIS BOOK ARE RESERVED. NO
PART OF THE BOOK MAY BE USED OR REPRO-
DUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITH-
OUT WRITTEN PERMISSION EXCEPT IN THE
CASE OF BRIEF QUOTATIONS EMBODIED DSf
CRITICAL ARTICLES AND REVIEWS. FOR IN-
FORMATION ADDRESS HARPER & BROTHERS,
49 EAST 33RD STREET, NEW YORK 16, N. Y.

FIRST ED ITION
G-A

For ANNIE and DAVID RIMMER
with the Affection and Gratitude of
Louis BROMFDELD

MR. SMITH

Prologue

IWO YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE WAR, I RECEIVED A

telephone call from a stranger describing himself as Sergeant
Burke. He asked for an appointment saying that he had with him
a parcel which came from an old friend of mine. He had, he said,
promised to deliver this parcel to me by hand. The old friend, he
said, was someone called Wolcott Ferris from the town of Cres-
cent City where I was born. For a moment the name lay dead and
unrecognized in the echoing spaces of a rather poor and fairly
overburdened memory. It was the words "Crescent City" which
gave me the clue.

I told the Sergeant to drop in about five o'clock and hung up
the telephone.

Then slowly, as I leaned back in my chair, the name of Wolcott
Ferris became a reality and took form physically in my memory.
But the form was not that of a man but of a boy of perhaps
fifteen or sixteen years of age. I had not seen Wolcott Ferris in
at least twenty-five years and I was puzzled as to why the
Sergeant had referred to him as an old friend. True, he had been
a friend of my boyhood, but I had not seen him since that happy
period.

In my memory I saw him again, slowly at first and then clearly,
on one of those expeditions which the boys of our neighborhood
used to make in the early spring, into the country along flooding
streams and through woods where the first anemones were begin-
ning to show their pale blue and mauve blossoms among the
fallen leaves.

He was a cheerful fellow, good-looking, and never afflicted

with the pimples that were the plague of most boys during
adolescence. He belonged to the same Scout troop as I did and
he was good at sports. I remember that even in those days he
always seemed to me one of those people who had everything
on his side. He came from a family which was prosperous and
even rich, a family whose history virtually followed that of the
town in which we lived. People liked him, and in high school he
was, if anything, plagued by the attentions of the giggling girl
students. He had everything that was needed to make for a
pleasant, successful, happy life.

And then I remembered that twice during the twenty-five years
since I had last seen him he had written me rather friendly
letters. I answered them although there wasn't much to say
except to recall the pleasant times of our boyhood. The only clue
as to why he should have written to me was contained in a single
sentence or two which I remember only dimly. They ran some-
thing like this, "Since we last met you have not only had a suc-
cessful life but a wonderfully interesting one. I often envy you
the experience of knowing so many kinds of people and of having
seen so much of the world. Sometimes I feel that I would like to
take up writing, but of course all that is nonsense. It is too late
to begin now,"

At the time I thought, "He just thinks that through me he might
meet a chorus girl or an actress/' I had had other letters from
men like him who seemed to believe that I lived perpetually in
a round of champagne, women, and gaiety. In both letters he had
written that the next time he came to New York he would give
me a ring. But he never did.

Now I was puzzled as to why he should send me a parcel to
be delivered personally by a third person. Why did 'he not
deliver it himself? Or send it by post? Or why was he sending
me a parcel at all?

The answer came at five o'clock when the Sergeant appeared.

He was one of those square, heavy, muscular men who seemed
ageless, with unruly black hair and blue eyes. I guessed that he
was about thirty-five, but he probably looked the same at twenty-
five and would look exactly the same at forty-five. He came in

[ 2 ]

shyly, impressed, I think, not by prosperity or prestige, but by
what such men conceive to be evidence of superior brains and
education. My office is a pleasant place filled with books.

We shook hands, and with some difficulty I got his hat and the
paper parcel away from him, after which he accepted my offer
of a drink and sat down.

"I hope I'm not bothering you," he said. "I would have sent
the package or just left it here but I kind of felt that I had to see
that nothing happened to it. I kind of owed it to Captain Ferris/*

I said that I understood.

Then as if he remembered suddenly, he said, "You know he
was killed in the South Pacific?"

"No," I said, not feeling anything in particular. "I'm sorry
to hear that."

"You see, I liked Captain Ferris/' he said. "He was a square
shooter and we got along fine. It was kind of tough going with
five guys stuck on a little island and forgotten by the Army for
more than two years. You know ... I guess . . . what that could
be like." He grinned. "Sometimes it was hell and we wanted to
kill each other."

I gave him another drink, noticing that perhaps out of nervous-
ness he had downed the first one in a couple of gulps. The drink
seemed to dissolve a little his shyness.

He said, "When he was killed it was kind of like losing a
brother. I'd got to count on him. It was worse too because he
wasn't killed in combat."

"How was he killed?"

"Well, nobody really knows. But he was shot one night by a
sentry who said he thought the Captain was a Jap trying to infilter
the caiap. This here particular sentry had a grudge against the
Captain, and the rest of us always thought the sonofabitch did
it on purpose." He sighed suddenly and went on, "But you
couldn't prove anything so the sonofabitch got off free. He was
lousy white trash from down South some place . . . you know the
kind . . . Ku-Kluxer and nigger hater."

Then he turned to the table where I had put the parcel,
picked it up, and gave it to me as if merely leaving it behind in
' [3 ]

my possession wasn't enough. He had to put it into my hands.
The presentation had the quality of a ritual.

"The Captain was always writing he said. "Sometimes he
wrote all night like he had to get something finished. This is it.
After he was killed I found it in his hut addressed to me sayin*
that if anything ever happened to him would I see that it was
delivered personally to you. I just wrapped it up and brought it
along with me. I carted it around with me till I got back to the
States and out of the lousy Army . . /*

"You never read it?" I asked.

"No. I'm not much on readin* if there's anything else to do.
I kinda got into the habit in the South Pacific because you had to
read or go crazy but once I got out of there I didn't have no more
time for readinY*

That was all he knew and all he told me, save that he had gone
into the Army at twenty-four and had become a top sergeant and
that after the war he got out of the Army as soon as possible.

"I used to like the Army," he said, "but it soured on me. The
next time they get me into the . . . thing, itll have to be with
ropes r

There wasn't anything more to talk about. The Sergeant
seemed to have no remarkable conversational gifts and we had
nothing in common save a joint acquaintance with a dead man
I had not seen in twenty-five years and even then the man he
knew was not the boy I had known. So after an awkward silence
or two, the Sergeant stood up and said, "Thanks for the drink
and the time. It's a weight off me to get the package safe to you.
I almost lost it a couple of times knockin' around. But it was
like . . . what do you call it? ... a mission. The Captain seemed
so wrapped up in it/* His square solid face seemed to soften a
little. "He was a funny guy. He could laugh or drink or tell a
dirty story and there wasn't nothin* high hat about him. But he
always seemed kind of sad. I guess he thought too much." Then
he grinned. "It's something I try to avoid as much as possible."

"Better leave your name and address/' I said. "I might want to
get in touch with you.**

[4]

I gave him a pencil and pad of paper, and, clumsily, as if they
were not used to spelling or writing, the hamlike hands wrote
out a name and address. Then he handed it to me, saying, "I
haven't got no address at the moment. I'm just knocking around
looking up old girl friends." He laughed. "Makin* up for lost time.
I got a lot of scrounging to do to get caught up with what I
missed during them lousy two years with no women around but
dirty fuzzy-wuzzies. But you can always reach me care of my
mother in Roxbury."

Then we shook hands again and he went away and I opened
the parcel. It contained two or three hundred pages of manu-
script, some written in longhand and some by typewriter. The
paper was of all kinds and descriptions and was discolored and
stained by the tropical sun and perhaps by salt fog. I started
reading it, and when dinnertime came I had my dinner brought
into the office and went on reading. I finished about two in the
morning, and on the last page, typed as a sort of P.S., I found a
note addressed to me.
It read,

"If you think this could be published I'd like it. It might

help some other poor bastard with the same disease as mine

. , . rotting from the core outward, you might say. W.F."

And then another thought occurred to me. The Sergeant had

said that Ferris' death had not been cleared up, that it had never

been established either as accident or murder. If the Sergeant

had bothered to open and read the manuscript he would have

found a third possibility which seemed the true solution. . . .

Ferris may well have gone out with the express purpose of being

shot by a sentry. Perhaps his end may have been a confusion of

all three of accident, murder, and suicide. It seemed planned

that way. . . . Perhaps for the sake of his extraordinary wife and

his unfortunate children. . . .

In any case, I did think the manuscript worth getting published
and here it is. I have called it "Mr. Smith." Perhaps you will
understand why.

L. B.
[ 5]

I Oakdale

IRIS HME I THINK I CAN DO IT. IT IS THE FOXJUTH TIME I

have tried but always something got in the way, something like a
fog or a wall or something in between and perhaps a mixture of
the two, but it wasn't any good. I would get to a certain point and
could go no further. What I was trying to do would simply get
beyond my reach. When I tried to go on putting on paper what I
felt, everything became confused, and no matter how long or
how late I sat in the rumpus room working, I got nowhere and
afterward whatever I had written had to be torn up and burned.

It couldn't be left about the house for anyone to pick up and
read. I did not even dare to risk tearing it into bits and putting
it into the garbage lest some person, maybe the garbage collector,
might out of curiosity begin piecing it together, and I knew that
if anyone put together enough of the pieces, he would go on
because he might recognize someone in the tale and be com-
pelled to patch and piece and read on and on. You see, it is all
about my own life and Enid's and the lives of all the people in
Oakdale.

AH that I had writf en was chock-full of dynamite, because, in
reality, it was written for myself alone as a kind of purge. I had
to put everything down and am doing the same thing now,
because that is the only way it can be done. Any cheating, any
disguise and compromise, I discovered very early, simply
destroyed the thing I was compelled to do in order to save my-
self. And so I wrote about everything truthfully and objectively,
perhaps as much as it is possible for one man to do. You see,
this is to be my one accomplishment in life, the single achieve-

[6]

ment in which I can take pride if I ever get it finished. All else
I have done is largely meaningless, routine, average, banal, with-
out savor or satisfaction. Perhaps too late in life I discovered that
I must do something in which I could take satisfaction, but more
than that I had to find out why I am, what I am, why my life
should be such a desert. It would, I hoped, act as a purge which
would permit me either to go on living or to regard death with a
contented eye and a satisfied spirit.

Try it sometime, if you have the leisure and the inclination.
Try writing down truthfully (or as near as you can come to
truth) everything about yourself what you have thought, what
you have done, how you feel toward your neighbors and your
own family. It is very difficult. Perhaps it is impossible even for
myself sitting here on this godforsaken, rank, and hellishly
beautiful island in the midst of the South Pacific, as detached
from the world which made me as it is possible for a man to be
detached from his past . . . without being dead.

In writing the truth, I find, as I found even at home in the
house in Oakdale (which is the rich suburb of Crescent City),
that I was cutting myself off from everything and everyone about
me. You understand, I saw my friends, my acquaintances, even
my wife and mother clearly for the first time. And so I stumbled
upon things which should scarcely be spoken, let alone put on
paper, and I found, very quickly, that what I was writing should
never come to the eye of anyone, at least so long as I was alive.
There were too many people involved, people who were friends
or acquaintances or even enemies (if I ever had any real
enemies), and most of them lived and still live in Crescent City.
I knew some of them from childhood. Some lived in the same
suburb as I, in nice expensive houses built by middle-class peo-
ple moderately successful in life like Enid and myself houses
which were "decorated" by a professional who came from
Chicago.

They were all decorated alike in rather ricli-looking muddy
colors because the decorator, who was a shrewd man and became
very rich by knowing his clientele, was aware that these people

[7]

(like Enid and me) wanted nothing revolutionary. They
wanted something that looked "rich" but not strange. The reds
of the curtains and the upholstery were never quite red, nor the
yellows yellow. All the colors were dimmed and muddy. "Off-
white" was an expression he was fond of using when he gestured
with his long white well-kept hands, and "off-white" got some-
how fixed in my brain as a symbol of so many things in the lives
of all my friends and of Enid and myself.

The decorator Mr. BanviUe by name had a whole jargon
which infuriated me the whole time he was in and out, doing
Enid's decoration after we built the new house. He spoke of
"occasional chairs" and "scatter rugs" and "gorgeous drapes" and
"lovely homes." It was a kind of chatter, a kind of second-rate
decorator's gobbledegook which was used by all of Enid's friends.
It belonged, I suppose, with the vast amount of hogwash, shady
thinking, and falsity which has been sold us by the hucksters of
the great advertising agencies things like "pure" salt and "forti-
fied" bread and "toasted" cigarettes.

Who wants to use pure sodium chloride on food when rock salt
or natural sea salt is so much better for the health and makes
food taste so much better? No Frenchman could be sold "pure"
salt. He knows too well what good food is. And who wants "forti-
fied" bread when nature provides all the vitamins and minerals
and a better flavor than any great chain baking company could
ever provide? And what does "toasted" tobacco mean? They are
all slogans and ideas, false and meretricious, which advertising
has sold us all. They assault our eyes from hideous signboards
desecrating the landscape, they ravage our ears when we are
listening to radio, the news or a good piece of music. And pres-
ently everybody, like a herd of ducks, begins to believe the non-
sense and hear it in his sleep and to repeat over and over again
saying, "Quack, quack! quack! Pure salt, fortified bread, occa-
sional chairs, scatter rugs, vitamins, ranch-type houses. Keep your
movements natural. Quack! Quack! Quack!"

That is exactly how Enid and her friends sounded when they

[8]

talked about Mr. Banville and his decorating. Since he it was who
decorated virtually all the houses in our suburb, they all looked
alike. Except for the shape of the rooms, you couldn't tell whether
you were in your own house or someone else's. But it made the
women all happy I suppose. They did not envy each other unless
one of them, whose husband had suddenly made a rich strike,
bought a near Old Master or a genuine piece of antique furniture.
Such an vent always caused great excitement and discussion and
criticism as if someone had thrown a stick into the circle of ducks
in a pond and set them all quacking more loudly than ever. And
sometimes, as when Mary Raeburn came back from Europe and
furnished part of the big old family house with the beautiful
things which she had collected over there, it confused some of
the newer and richer inhabitants of our suburb and led to the
wonderful remark attributed to Mrs. Hershall, who didn't have
much background but a great deal of depression money ( owing
to HershalTs being very liquid financially and buying up all the
things other people had to sell in order to keep their heads above
water). She was quoted as saying, "What a pity Mary Raeburn's
money gave out before she finished the house and she couldn't
afford new furniture!" This, of course, was an absurd statement
because, as everyone knew, Mary Raeburn was rich enough to
buy and sell the Hershalls many times over.

But during those long evenings when, after the kids had gone
to bed and Enid had left me alone in the rumpus room to work,
all of these things and many more kept getting in the way of
putting down on paper what I knew I had to put on paper. Some-
how just when I was getting to where I could see things clearly
and put it all down in writing, I would become lost in a cloud of
"occasional chairs" and "scatter rugs" and golf scores and build-
ing plans and servant troubles. It was like drowning in a flood
that was filled with flotsam and jetsam made up of all sorts of
rubbish which looked like junk but when regarded separately and
individually all became terribly important. I knew it was junk and
that our lives were cluttered up with it, but the knowledge made
no difference except that it simply confused me still further.

[ 9 ]

It was a, struggle to get those few hours o peace late at night
when I could sit down and try to think things out. I wanted to
get it all on paper because I felt with a terrible urgency that if I
could once get it on paper in concrete form, it would stop
troubling me, gnawing away at my happiness and the happiness
of Enid and the children and their futures, as well as because the
whole thing was affecting me and my business. I hadn't any heart
in the business any more. I couldn't go on building it up, increas-
ing the amount of my income by more and more commissions on
more and more insurance premiums. I was confused and I was
tired, and it isn't right for a man to be tired in his late thirties.
Then he should be at his best and most vigorous with the vigor
of youth blended with the wisdom and experience he* should have
acquired by that time.

It wasn't anything physical. I was strong as an ox in that way
with a good physique and no sign of a slight potbelly or any
excess weight. I was tired in the head and in the spirit. Now I
think it came partly from never being alone, because in the
world in which I lived, nobody ever seemed to want to be alone.
Indeed, they seemed to have a terror of it. They all wanted to
lunch together, or play golf together, or go to the country club
or the women's clubs together, or meet in the hotel bar or in the
corner drug store to kill time over the pinball machines. And in
the suburbs, with all the houses built close to each other, where
a two-hundred-foot lot was an estate, there was never an evening
alone. Either we were going to some party or outdoor barbecue,
or someone was coming to us or just dropping in "because they
didn't have anything to do that evening." And even when I was
at home, there were always Enid and the children, Ronnie and
Esther.

They all had the idea that no one could enjoy himself unless
there were several people in the room with the radio playing.
Even reading wasn't possible because the children were always
interrupting and Enid, who had no taste for reading, would in-
sist on conversation, not of a sustained and interesting kind on
any particular subject, but just rattling along, always breaking in

[ 10]

upon your thoughts just when something was becoming clear, or
raddling your attention just as you had lost yourself in a novel or
a biography or popular book about science.

Of course, it got a little worse as she grew older and fell into
the habits of our neighbors and insisted on having a cocktail or
two before dinner when we were alone. I didn't mind the cock-
tail. I liked it because often enough I came home tired and
bored. The office had been full of people, and then I had had
lunch with the boys at the hotel or the Club and after that the
office again and then to the drug store to pick up the big-city
papers and more of the boys there around the pinball machine
and sometimes it meant going into the hotel bar for a quickie
with more greetings, more drinks, and more confusion, and then
home. The only time I was ever alone for a moment was in the
toilet, and even there I nearly always found some other man who
hung around talking over the partition rather than be alone or go
back to his work.

When I got home one of two things happened. I found Enid
with all the cocktail apparatus laid out and herself full of house-
keeping troubles and gossip or with another couple or one or two
women who had come in because their husbands happened to be
out and they were left alone. Or it would be a party somewhere
and we'd go for dinner at seven-thirty and finally, after so much
drink that everyone had become boisterous or quarrelsome, sit
down to eat about nine or nine-thirty. The interim had been
spent in drinking enough to reach that level where they could all
enjoy themselves and forget that flooding torrent of little things
which made them both tired and unhappy. Sometimes weeks
would go by when I was never alone for a second, because even
after I had gone to bed Enid was there beside me in the other
bed imposing upon me secretly and powerfully, even when she
didn't speak, the fact that she was there and that we were (by
God! ) a happily married, prosperous couple who might serve as
a model for the rest of the world. At times there seemed to me
that there was a certain malignance in this silent, psychotic
pressure.

She was very determined about our being a model happily
married couple. She was determined about it even in her sleep.
You could almost feel her imposing the illusion upon you. I do
not know whether she believed it or not but she certainly believed
that she believed it, I have always been a fairly good-natured
man and, I think, honestly, kindlier than most, but sometimes I
have been known to lose my temper and when that happened I
was for a little while quite insane, perhaps with the stored-up
repression of not speaking my mind when I should have done so.
On such occasions I would never have wanted to face myself for
I am aware that I could become viciously cruel and say things
which were like stripping the skin from a living body.

In our world that was an easy thing to do, because it was largely
a world of illusion and to shatter any illusion was a criminal thing .
to do. That, I think, is why so many people in our world were
afraid to be alone because, in spite of anything they could do,
solitude would permit the creeping in of small thoughts and
corroding doubts which were like maggots, little doubts which
could, as they grew and multiplied, destroy the whole fabric of
existence and create in its place the bare skeleton of despair.
Once in our small world and many times elsewhere, when a man
or a woman committed suicide, people would say, "I can't imagine
why he (or she) did such a thing. He had plenty of money. He
had a nice family. Apparently he had no worries.'*

But I think I know the reason. The maggots had gone to work,
and presently the whole structure fell because a man or -woman
realized with a horrible and devasting sense of futility that every-
thing added up to nothing, that nothing had ever happened to
him or ever would, that he was merely killing time until he died,
like those men about the pinball machine in the corner drug store,
nice fellows, kindly most of them, prosperous enough at middle
age to take it easy, who would spend hours each day around a
pinball machine killing time until they died. Only they kept them-
selves distracted by talking and drinking and playing golf and
watching the little lights light up and never being alone so that
the maggots could never go to work on them. And a few years

[ 12 ]

later a heart attack or kidneys weakened by too much drinking in
order not to think or to drown the boredom would get them and
nobody would miss them very much and certainly not the world
itself. They left enough money to take care of their families and
that was all right and pretty soon they were forgotten. On their
tombstones might have been written with a monotonous uni-
formity, "He lived without ever being alive. Nothing ever hap-
pened to him."

Of course presumably love can happen to you, the kind of
overwhelming love which annihilates all else, which partakes of
passion and voluptuousness and cleanses the spirit, even pre-
sumably a love which goes on and on; but it never happened to
me and certainly it never happened to most of the people I have
known. Marriage in the world I know is usually a process of find-
ing someone congenial, of "good" family, and possessed of a
little money, with whom at the moifient you experience a rather
vague and somewhat temporary desire to sleep. If it's the first
time the experience has happened to you, you think the whole
thing is "Tristan and Isolde" but presently it turns out that it
isn't and the whole thing breaks up or you get used to it or
presently you get bored with it and go out and buy it by the
night or take to half -tipsy necking with some middle-aged woman
in the back seat of a parked car at the country club or down some
suburban lane. Or maybe you're pious and churchgoing and don't
step out at all and finally put love on the same level as old-
fashioned Saturday-night bath or a dose of Carter's Little Liver
Pills. But Tristan and Isolde or Hero and Leander! I never heard
of it in my world. I know some nice well-adjusted elderly couples
who have made a go of it, and they are perhaps the nicest and
wisest people there are because with all passion spent they were
still able to remain on affectionate terms, with common interests
and a respect for each other's individuality and personality.

Enid, if you had asked her, would have told you that our life
together was radiantly happy and that we were the ideal married
couple, but anything on the level of Tristan and Isolde she would
have considered frightening and dirty. That wasn't love; it was

[ 13]

passion. Real love was respectable like the muddy colors Mr.
Banville used in his "gorgeous drapes." It wasn't that she was
frigid or that she disliked going to bed with me. I think she liked
it well enough i I wasn't too demanding and I know she wanted
to keep it up long after I was willing to call it a day (which
didn't help matters). It was only that love should fit into its
proper- place in her picture of things and not crowd out any-
thing else.

More than once I have overheard her discussing the whole
business with a couple of other women and they all seemed to
be in agreement. The only time any of them in our world kicked
over the traces was when they got well along into middle age
and the maggots got to work and it occurred to some of them that
maybe they had missed something and had better make up for
lost time before it was too late. That was when they took to the
back seats of parked cars with a bottle of Bourbon and a middle-
aged neighbor. Sometimes it was pitiful and sometimes comical,
but it was always a little frantic and never very romantic.

The trouble is that in our world and indeed among most
Americans nobody ever experiences passionate love. Nobody
ever cares enough to murder or kill themselves over love. They
just arrange a divorce and then marry again somebody they think
they love, sometimes again and again in a kind of chain-store
legalized adultery. Or they take to a bottle of Bourbon and the
back seat. It must make it very difficult for those who try to write
tragic novels. You can't make authentic tragedy out of trivial
superficial characters. Nobody could make tragedy or even drama
out of Enid.

The trouble with Enid was that she was always living up to the
pattern or rather the illusion she had created for herself. In a way
she was always acting a part that of the devoted wife and
mother with an adoring husband who could not live without her.
If I went to the end of the garden to lie alone with a book in the
hammock she would presently appear with some mending, to sit
on the bench and begin one of those thought-shattering running
commentaries on life, the neighbors, the cook, etc., etc., etc. She

[ M]

had persuaded herself completely that I was much happier hav-
ing her there with me and, subconsciously, of course she was not
seeing a husband who wanted a little peace to read and think and
was in reality quietly hating her, nor was she seeing herself as a
very limited woman, emotionally and intellectually, just quacking
like a duck because she could not be alone and because she
thought she was fascinating and "holding" her husband (a subject
under constant consideration in her circles). No, it was not like
that at all. She saw it in her own way and convinced herself of
the truth of her vision of us as a couple who preferred constantly
to be with each other and were restless and lonely if not per-
petually in each other's company. It was a hellish illusion but a
very common one at which she and her friends actually worked.

Of course when I found that the only peace and solitude was
to be had after midnight and took to shutting myself up in the
rumpus room to work at this thing which I had to do, she became
disturbed. I sometimes think she resented this rebellion of mine,
which broke her great pattern and illusion, more than if she had
actually discovered I had been unfaithful to her. By shutting
myself into solitude away from her I had betrayed her and the
role for which she had cast herself and me. Sometimes I struggled
with what I was trying to do until two or three in the morning,
but instead of sensibly going to bed and to sleep, she would
remain awake no matter how tired she was, wandering aimlessly
about the house with the radio playing, changing from station
to station as they closed down one by one for the night.

At other times, just when I would begin to make some progress
on what I was trying to do, I would hear her footsteps overhead
and everything would be ruined. At first I believed this was
accidental but later on I think she came to know that by turning
up the radio or banging the door of the refrigerator or walking
across the floor above my head she could thwart me and presently
force me back into her pattern from which I had rebelled so
mildly for a little while. You see, what she could not bear was not
only that I had broken the illusion by wanting to be alone and
shutting myself up but that I had escaped from her. When I was

[ 15]

in the rumpus room working, the thin door put me in another
world into which she could not enter and roam around.

The rumpus room was built into the house long after it was
finished and we moved into it. I don't really know why we built
it because we had above-stairs a perfectly good and big living
room ? a pleasant screened veranda, a terrace, and I had a small
room for my fishing rods, some papers, my guns, and my books,
few enough in the beginning but increasing in number as life
seemed to lose something of its excitement and I took to books
as an escape and for a time as a kind of hobby.

The rumpus room occupied some unused space in the basement
and was finished in waxed cypress. At one end there was a bar
with four high stools upholstered in bright red leather. The
chairs were covered with a kind of red dyed sailcloth, and for
some reason I have forgotten, since there was nothing whatever
nautical in my life or my family's, it was decorated with pictures
of sailing vessels and bits of rope cable. It is likely that Enid saw
some such room in the Garden and Home magazines and pro-
ceeded to copy it. There was of course a card table and several
rather expensive unused games stowed away on the shelves and a
radio, an old one replaced by a newer model. It was the only room
in the house in which there was any really pure color that was not
muddy or "off" some other color. I suppose this was to encourage
and even possibly to denote gaiety. The curtains were of red and
white checked cotton stuff.

Such a room was, I suppose, remotely descended from pro-
hibition times, but by the time we built our own room everyone
seemed to have one. They were a part of all the houses con-
structed in Oakdale, as much a part of every house as a bathroom.
At first the room seemed to bring something into our lives, but I
am inclined to think that what it brought in was not simply what
we thought it was a new element of gaiety and unaccustomed
spontaneity. The real pleasure it brought us was the pleasure of
creating, a pleasure rare enough in our world. When the house
itself was built, everything was left to the architect, partly be-
cause, despite the fact that both Enid and myself had spent four

t 16]

years in college and been graduated "complete" with diplomas,
we did not know anything about architecture or the history of
architecture beyond what was called "colonial" or "early Ameri-
can." We had heard about "Gothic" but not much more than that
It was not that we had skimped our studies in the field of archi-
tecture or had not remembered what we had been taught. It was
simply that in all the years we had spent in school we had never
been taught anything at all about architecture which was a
curious commentary on four years of training which was desig-
nated as a course in the "liberal arts."

We did not even allow the architect to bully us, for we had no
ideas strong enough to provide any opposition. We had just what
everyone else had in Oakdale and ours was wrapped up in a
package which the architect labeled "Georgian." But in the crea-
tion of the rumpus room he had no part. The contractor did the
whole thing under our direction, and so in a way the rumpus
room was the only part of the house with which we had anything
to do or which properly we could call our own. Perhaps that is
the reason I liked it best of all the rooms in the house and chose
it as a kind of fortified refuge against Enid and indeed all of
Oakdale.

At first we used to bring people down there for a drink or two
but after a time we came to use it less and less. It was more
comfortable to sit upstairs in the living room or in summer it
was pleasanter to sit outside on the terrace. And presently we
came to abandon it altogether to the children and as a^ sleeping
place for my setter who, I think, never really liked it. Essentially
it was an ugly room, with its marine affectations and checked
curtains and ugly uncomfortable early- American furniture. Finally
it came into some real use when I discovered that it was the one
place in the house where for a few minutes at a time I could lock
myself in and be alone, not "sharing" everything with Enid.

After a while she developed a new angle that I must not stay
up so late because it was ruining my health and I was not getting
enough rest and then on top of that grew still another angle
that because I was staying up so late I was neglecting my in-

[ 17 ]

surance lousiness, and with prices going up and the children to
educate,' we wouldn't have enough money to go on living in
Oakdate in the kind of house we were living in. I think there was
at least a certain sincerity in this because she, like most of her
friends, lived in a perpetual terror of having to scale down the
way they lived. If anyone in their world encountered such a
catastrophe, the others leapt in for the kill with slobbering lips
like animals pouncing upon and killing one of their number who
has been hurt. It would begin, "Have you heard Mrs. So-and-So
has had to give up her cook?" or, "You know, Molly is doing her
own cleaning now. Tom must be losing money." And sometimes
the very rumors and gossip would bring about the final collapse,
hardship, and tragedy. To fail materially in that world, to slip
down the scale, was as much a tragedy as having one's sixteen-
year-old daughter go on the street. That was why such morbid
emphasis was placed upon all material things from bathrooms to
interior decorators to automobiles. They were a symbol of wealth
like strings of shells worn about the necks of savages. I think Enid
did actually worry about our sliding down the scale of material
things.

But she kept trying constantly to thwart me, to disturb and
disrupt what I was doing, always of course with the inference
that she loved me so much she was worried about my health
and happiness. I have no doubts that at times she did believe
all this sincerely, but for a great part of the time this was not
at all the motive of her concern. It is one of the confusing things
about life that all is not black or white but very mixed up, and
from the moment I began writing and shut myself away from
her, our relations steadily became more unsatisfactory. Of the
two of us I was the one who suffered least from the whole
experience, from the late hours and the lack of sleep at least
to judge from physical appearance and reactions. She it was
who became more and more nervy and short-tempered, who
lost weight, who developed dark circles beneath her eyes. If
anything I was happier and felt better, probably because the
hours which I spent alone there in the rumpus room, doing not

[ 18 ]

only what I wanted to do but what I had to do, were more
restful to me than the hours of disturbed sleep spent in the twin
bed next to her when I could feel, awake or asleep, that curious,
almost desperate determination to impose upon me the pattern
of an existence which was what she felt our life ought to be.

At first she would not even leave me in peace but would come
to the door of the rumpus room from time to time and open it
and walk into the room and say, "Darling, don't you think it is
time to go to bed? You've been working too long."

And at first I was polite and told her to go on to bed and that
I was quite old enough to decide for myself, but when the
annoyance continued I had the courage at last simply to lock
the door. The first time she made the discovery of the locked
door and, on trying it, failed to get any answer, she went around
the outside of the house and climbed into the small areaway
outside one of the cellar windows opening into the basement
room in which I had shut myself up. She could not quite manage
to squeeze herself through so small an opening. The knocks on
the door had disturbed me in what I was doing, and I had
scarcely re-established my train of thought when the scuffling
noise in the areaway (at the back of the room where she could
not see me) ruined everything all over again and I left the card
table on which I worked and went to investigate.

There she was, as you might say, "stuck" in the areaway. The
window was too small to admit her into the room and the area-
way was too small and deep for her to climb out unaided. She
was merely trapped and threshing about.

I tried to keep my temper and said, 'Wait, 111 go outside and
give you a hand/*

When I got outside I reached down and pulled her out. I said,
"What on earth were you trying to do?"

But she was hysterical and crying and could not answer at
first. Then standing there in the darkness she said, "I thought
something had happened to you. I thought you'd had a heart
attack or something/'

"I only wanted to be left alone," I said.

[ 19]

Then her hysteria began to turn to anger and she answered,
"I don't know what you mean. I don't bother you. All you needed
to have done was answer my knock. That wouldn't have hurt
you."

I started to explain that interruptions upset me in what I was
doing and then checked myself. What was the use? She would
merely go back to trying to find out what it was that I was
doing.

"It's only because I love you so much," she said. "I was frantic
when I thought something had happened to you."

So my solitude and all chance of writing was gone again for
that night. I had to fetch whisky for her and make a pretense
of contrition over causing her such alarm, although for the mo-
ment I wished her dead.

All this you might have said was caused by my own weakness
and lack of decision. You might have said that I should have told
her to mind her own damned business or that I should have gone
away to Maine or the Rocky Mountains. But it is not so easy as
that, as any decent married man with reasonable kindness and
affection in him well knows. I liked my children. Indeed at times
I loved them in genuine fashion. I liked to find them there when
I returned from the office. I liked occasionally to read the funnies
to them. And in a physical sense I liked my own house and the
garden which I had made painfully and slowly out of bare,
unfertile, filled suburban soil into a small and blooming paradise.
I liked peace and remained a peaceful man and even a patient
one save for those rare outbreaks of violent temper when physi-
cally it became impossible for me to bear any more. "Bear any
more what?" you might ask, and I could not really answer you
because what I had to endure was at once so confused, so in-
tangible, and yet so concrete and real.

It was not Enid alone. It was the whole of that life, all out-
wardly so prosperous with two cars in the garage, a country club,
a large, beautifully "decorated" home, two children and a moder-
ately good-looking and well-dressed wife all, in short, which
you might say the average American man could possibly want

[20 ]

or desire. Enid was perfectly a part of the pattern and acted her
role as if superbly cast for it, and like the possessive American
wives of so many prosperous and apparently happy American
husbands, she wanted not to lose her husband, and I speak not
only in the physical sense but of something far more subtle. She
wanted to keep the domination of him so that he did what she
wanted, provided her with what she desired, shared every
thought with her, made her friends his friends but all without
his ever suspecting that these things were happening.

She had too, of course, an extraordinary faculty, perhaps not
so singular and uncommon as it appeared to me, of lying in small
things and believing actually that she was telling the truth. It
was a part, I think, of her acting a role. So long as she kept within
the role she had conceived for herself in the domestic drama
she had created to include me and the children and the house
and the neighbors, she believed herself sincere and honest and
justified in almost any tactic. And of course in the back of her
mind there was always, without any doubt, the steel-clad convic-
tion that she knew "best" and that everything she did was for
my good and the children's good and that in reality she was
perfectly selfless in the whole matter. These tactics lie, half
recognized, deep in the minds of countless American wives, and
a^ the method succeeds with the passing of time, it becomes a
rigid and relentless thing, so calloused over by practice that it
is not recognized at all. It becomes merely a daily way of life.
At times it seems to me "the American way of life," at least in
the prosperous upper-middle-class life I have known. The varia-
tions are infinite but the pattern is the same.

This process may drive a husband close to madness and it has
undoubtedly caused more than one murder, or he may simply
ignore it and spend more and more time at the Elks or playing
golf and restrict his misery merely to the hours which, for the
sake of his children or out of profound sense of respectability,
he spends at home with his wife.

The situation centering about the rumpus room grew worse
and not better. It infuriated her, I think, that I had at last devised

[21 ]

a way of being alone for a little time. Her own pride was strong
enough not to permit a repetition of climbing down the areaway
to get at me, and she realized, I think, the absurdity of screaming
and pounding on the door in order to force me to open it But
never would she go to the bedroom until I myself went to bed.
She even took to washing odd bits of clothing in the washing
machine of the adjoining basement room, an action for which
there was no necessity since she had a laundress for two days
a week as well as a part-time cook and housemaid. When at last
we went to bed it was usually in silence, a very hurt silence on
her part s which she made certain I would recognize not only by
the thickness of the atmosphere but by deep sighs and much
tossing about, so that she kept my irritation alive long into the
night and at times made me hate her for being even in the same
room with me.

You see, she managed always, in her own eyes at least, to put
me in the wrong, to imply that I neglected her and was cruel
to her and caused her great suffering, and in her heart she
sincerely believed this, tending and fostering a whole situation
which in fact existed only in so far as she created it all of this
simply because there were times when I wanted to be alone
from her and from everyone.

Of course what maddened her most and I cannot quite blame
her for this was not merely the knowledge that I had found
a way of locking myself up alone so that she could not reach
me but the fact that beyond the faint pounding of the typewriter,
which late at night was always spasmodically in her ears, she
did not know what I was thinking or what I was putting on
paper. When she asked me what I was writing, I answered truth-
fully enough that I did not know. It might be a novel; it might
be a kind of autobiography. It might merely be a pile of rubbish,
but it was something I had to do if I was to continue living.

To her, of course, this was the merest hogwash. Nobody had
to behave in such a ridiculous fashion. What did I mean by
"continue living?" et cetera, et cetera. No other husband be-
haved in such an absurd fashion.

[22]

She would not even believe that I was telling her the truth as
nearly as I was able to tell it. She wanted to read what I had
written, but I refused because I was genuinely shy about my
ability to write anything and because if I had let her see it she
would have understood none of it and some of it, in which I
wrote about her and her friends, would have driven her into
fury or perhaps into despair. It never for a moment occurred to
her that I had a right to privacy or even to my own thoughts. I
was merely betraying her.

I had great trouble in concealing the few pages which I pre-
served from time to time because they seemed to be what I
wanted to accomplish. I knew well enough that in the curious
pattern of behavior and illusion she created, she would have no
scruples whatever in reading the stuff if she could lay hands upon
it. She felt, I knew, that this was her right, even as she felt it
her just and honorable right to examine at times the contents
of the drawers in my desk and the cards and addresses in my
wallet. Early in our marriage I found that she felt it perfectly all
right to open and read letters addressed to me, and when I pro-
tested, although there was at the time nothing for me to hide, she
said, "I don't see what's wrong about it. My mother always read
all our letters, even my father's. We're married aren't we?" She
stopped the practice openly, but she continued to steam open
and reseal much of my correspondence.

At this pilfering she was not very skillful. She put things
back in what she believed was the proper order and sequence
but always the contents of drawer and wallet were just enough
disturbed for me to know that she had been at it again. She
never mentioned this practice perhaps because she never found
anything that might have been incriminating, yet she could not
stop doing it over and over again. She did it not, I think, because
she suspected me of infidelity but simply because she had to
know everything about me (which of course she never did
know). It was all a part of what she called "sharing'' our life.
"A happy husband and wife," she would say, "should share every-
thing. There should be no secrets."

[ 23 ]

This deformity even extended in reverse to lier own behavior.
If I did not ask her each evening where she had been, whom
she had seen, what she was planning for the next day, she would
pout in her peculiar way, which was not a pout at all but a
kind of acid aggressive sulkiness, and say that I was never inter-
ested in what she and the children were doing or in what hap-
pened to them. It wasn't only that she wanted to share me, inside
and out, but she wanted me to share her whether I wanted to or
not or felt like it at the moment. Of the two, I think the latter was,
if anything, the worse experience.

So you see, I think, why I tried four times to do what I am
doing now and each time failed, lost and befogged by the life
around me, so that my purpose and any pattern I had devised
soon began to crumble into chaos. This time, sitting in the wet
hot jungle on the other side of the world, with no companionship
but a tough extrovert Army sergeant whose only concern is his
appetites and his functions, and three younger soldiers who lead
their own separate and somewhat peculiar existences, I may
finish up what I must do, which is to straighten out and put on
paper in some concrete form the pattern and significance, if any,
of my own existence. If I do not succeed I may kill myself. I
have been very near to it a dozen times and I have not com-
mitted the final act simply because of the strong feeling that
I must live until I have done this job. Then I may kill myself
or I may feel that, in putting down on paper the pattern, I shall
be freed not only of the life and the little world which I came
to hate but even perhaps of myself the self who got me into all
the mess and then was not courageous enough to smash every-
thing in a determination to escape.

This passionate desire all began one October morning nearly a
dozen years ago while I was shaving and suddenly looked into
my own eyes and saw myself. Perhaps it has happened to other
men and perhaps it failed to affect them in the same way as it
affected me or perhaps they shrewdly and quickly turned away
from the mirror and then back again in order not to find them-
selves this time but merely a face, a characterless almost in-

[24 ]

animate face, from which they were scraping a few bristly hairs
as they had done thousands of times before. Perhaps that is
what I should have done . . . but I didn't.

I stood there with my razor poised, looking into my own eyes,
thinking, "This is you? This is the guy you have to live with for
the rest of your life? What is you? Are you decent and kindly or
a monster? What is it you want? Whither are you bound? Why
are you shut off from everyone and everything in spite of every
effort to lose yourself? Where did you come from and where will
you end? What are you here for? What are you doing with this
short space of time permitted you on earth? What becomes of
you when this flesh dies and withers away? What are you miss-
ing? What precious experience . . . what richness, what unknown
pleasures and delights and satisfactions have you not had while
life rushes on day after day with never any time to be alone, to
think, or to do anything but the monotonous secure round of a
mildly prosperous existence? What is your significance a mere
speck in the universe but immensely important to yourself? In
short, what are you? Why the hell do you exist? Why do you
go on living?"

These were morbid and even dangerous thoughts for a pros-
perous insurance broker living in a suburb with a wife and two
children.

I do not know how long I stood there looking into my own
blue eyes which somebody it sounds like Ruskin referred to
as "the windows of the soul." The face was perhaps a better-
looking than average face, with a straight nose, a rather full
mouth, blondish slightly curling hair, a rather stubborn chin,
and large close-set ears. The face was agreeable enough and
told the passer-by something the stubbornness in the chin, the
sensuality of the mouth pinched a little at the corner as if that
sensuality had never been satisfied, the vigor that was in the
large ears. But it was the eyes which told everything, rather
large blue-gray eyes set fairly well apart. It was the eyes which
fascinated me, for they came nearest to telling me what I was,
the eyes which betrayed to me on that October morning the

' [25]

doubts and fears and dissatisfactions which I had never recog-
nized or allowed myself to recognize until that morning.

Something extraordinary happened in that moment. All the
surroundings, I was aware, were the same the familiar bath-
room with the initialed towels, the birds singing in the garden
outside, the occasional yelp of one of the children as they quar-
reled while getting ready for school, the voice of Enid admonish-
ing them. It was all the same but suddenly everything became
different. The sounds I heard, even the familiar initialed towels
(selected by Mr. Banville to match the walls and toilet seat),
took on a significance. They meant something, all fitting together
in a pattern of what shall we say? oppression, monotony,
futility, imbecility? I cannot say. Suddenly I hated my house, my
wife, my daily existence, even for a moment, my own children.
Everything has remained different ever since that morning.

Presently I heard a knock on the door and I heard Enid's
voice asking, "Are you all right? Is there anything wrong?" and
I knew that I must have been staring at myself for a long time,
completely lost to such things as time or appointments or offices
or whether someone else wanted to use the bathroom.

Startled back into reality I answered> 'Tm okay. I was just
thinking," and I heard her faint laugh as if something deep in
her soul found the process of thinking merely ridiculous.

I finished shaving and dressing and went off to the office and
presently forgot all about the experience, but the forgetfulness
was merely temporary. In the days that followed the memory of
the unnerving experience kept returning to me, and I found that
unless I deliberately shaved in a hurry without once looking
into my own eyes, I would slip back again into regarding myself
as if I were a stranger a questioning and querulous stranger.

You might say that this whole process was, in the terms of the
new psychology, the beginnings of narcissism, but this would
not be true since narcissism implies love of self even to the point
of the physical, and this was certainly not true of me. It was not
my self but another self in which I was interested and which I
tried to study. It was not even egotism. I think I can describe it

[26]

only as a fierce desire to explore the thing which in the last
analysis was me, and in exploring it, of course, I could not
exclude the things, the influences, and the people around me
and in a way the whole of living as it touched me and I
touched it.

Well, that is how it happened, and I advise you never to hegin
such a process of examination for there is no end to it until you
cease to exist and it is very certain that even though the body
dies and decays, we still have no assurance that the spirit, the
ego, the soul, or what you will dies with it, so there is perhaps
really no end to the thing at all. Better live like an animal, di-
rectly as my Sergeant does, concerned only with food and women
and enough money to provide him with both. He likes doing
things with his hands and is very good at it He can make up
radio sets out of tin cans and rig up elaborate laundry machines
and trick shower baths, He has no doubts. He is, I think, in-
capable of worry. He can only be annoyed when he has not
enough to eat or there is not a woman at hand when he wants
her.

II The Jungle

IKE HUT IN WHICH I AM WBTI1NG IS CONSTRUCTED OF

corrugated iron, about twelve by fifteen feet in size. At first it had
a roof of corrugated iron but the heat became intolerable and the
Sergeant and I covered it over with plantain leaves thatched to-
gether thickly in an amateur way. It keeps out the rain, until it
rots, which everything does very quickly here (even men's minds
and bodies), and it is much cooler now. The boys have done the
same thing to their own huts. It appears that back in Washington
it has never occurred to the Army bureaucrats that iron absorbs
heat and that in the tropics it is scarcely a material suitable for
roofing. Perhaps one of these days an inspecting officer will visit

[ 27]

us, make a great row and insist that we remove the plantain leaves
and restore the corrugated iron because plantain leaves are not
"regulation." The roof has a life of its own for it was scarcely
finished before it became inhabited by every sort of rodent,
spider, lizard and centipede. Living their own nocturnal lives,
there is a perpetual sound of rustling throughout the damp nights.

In my hut I have an Army cot, a crude wooden table, two home-
made chairs, a typewriter, an enameled wash basin and some
books. It is simple enough. Many might consider my home lack-
ing in comfort and constricted in size, but to me it is a kind of
paradise. In it I live alone. It is all mine. I share it with no one
save when the Sergeant or one of the boys comes in to talk, which
is seldom enough. And when they do come in, I find for the first
time in my life that I know a man and can talk to him. In a place
like this there is little to hide and small reason to hide anything.
It is extraordinary how frank and honest our conversations can be
and even at times how sympathetic and understanding. I think
that is because all of us, save Homer, the wool-hat, feel that we
are lost and abandoned and that all the conventions, the restric-
tions, the hypocrisies of ordinary everyday life back home have
no place or meaning here in this primitive world. We are all in
the same boat.

Meyer doesn't talk much . . , indeed hardly at all, but when he
does talk he reveals things which I am certain he has never re-
vealed to anyone, even his wife, back home in Brooklyn. But Al,
the Kansas farm boy, talks quite frankly about anything at all and
has a collection of the finest hair-raising physiological stories ever
heard. And the Sergeant tells you everything, every tremor, every
nuance, every technical detail of what might be called only by
the wildest stretch of romance his 'love lif e."

Outside our huts there is a row of Quonsets and a white beach
between the coral reef and the place where coral sand turns
suddenly into thick, black constantly decaying soil and the jungle
rises abruptly like a wall in a tangle of wet, lush, dark green
growth. It is virtually impenetrable save for a path leading to
the nearest village, less than a mile away a path which is kept

[28]

open by the villagers themselves, who come to us on visits of
curiosity, and by Homer, the wool-hat, who uses it in his rutting
animal-like excursions.

The village is built on stilts for protection against flood and
wild animals and beneath the houses there lie perpetual heaps
of garbage and excrement in which a race of razorback pigs
scrounge for a living. When the wind comes from the east you
can smell the village and of course you can smell it whenever a
villager with oiled kinky hair and greasy body comes to stare at
us and make grunting noises.

It rains perpetually, at all hours of the day and night, the rain
coming, it seems at times, out of nowhere. But when the sun
shines, it is with a dazzling light reflected from the white coral
sand so brilliantly that all of us, even Homer, the wool-hat, per-
petually wear dark glasses and live in fear of losing or breaking
them. Yet when you enter the jungle even for a distance of a yard
or two, the brilliance vanishes and is replaced by a thick deep
green gloom in which the vegetation feeds upon itself in a con-
stant cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth. Yet with
all this fantastic growth there is little to eat and what there is
consists mostly of nitrogen, carbon and starch. In the midst of all
this opulent growth, the natives suffer from malnutrition and are
the victims of every kind of disease. Homer, the wool-hat, brought
the flu with him when we arrived and passed it on to some native
woman. Within ten days there were five deaths in the village.

Yet the place has a wild and extravagant beauty, especially at
dawn or at sunset when the water between the outer reef and the
coral beach turns crimson and gold. But the beauty is too much.
It cloys in its extravagance and at times even grows terrifying.
Yet I like it. Even when I sit at my typewriter naked with the
sweat pouring off me in the wretched damp heat, I like it. I am
relaxed. I am myself. I am free. I am, to all intents and purposes,
alone, at least in spirit. No one is sharing or possessing me. I have
to make few compromises. My responsibilities are simple to the
point of being primitive. I even like my fellow prisoners here on
this island, with the possible exception of Homer, the wool-hat,

[ 29 ]

and even lie does not bore me because I find him a fascinating
specimen unlike anything I have ever met before in all my exist-
ence. He seems a combination of jackal, wart hog and hyena.

With the Sergeant I have the greatest bond of sympathy, per-
haps because he is nearer my own age and because, happily for
him, he seems to have been born without all the conventions,
the false values, the hypocrisies which I have had to strip away
with great effort and pain until I stand at last almost as naked
and free as he is.

The other three, the Army privates who are here on this hateful
but beautiful island, are a mixture. Al is a farm boy from Kansas
who wants only one thing to return to his father's farm and
marry the daughter of the next-door neighbor. Meyer is a swarthy
little fellow from Brooklyn. He has a tailor shop and is married
and has one child. He suffers from being away from his wife and
child and even from Brooklyn which to him is paradise. The third,
Homer, is a shambling, long-faced, "wool-hat'* Georgian who
can barely read or write. He is apparently quite happy because
everything in the world astonishes him, from the size of ocean-
going ships or the inside of a radio to some of the peculiar facts
about sex which he never dreamed existed until he got out of
his backwoods cabin into the Army.

In another world and background I should probably be bored
by all of them and never get to know them at all. Here I have no
choice but to know them and in doing so I have discovered that
very likely no human is in essence a bore or a mediocrity. It is
only that we do not have the time to explore or that we are
blocked by our own limitations of interest. In this lonely jungle
they make gardens in which radishes and beans grow up and
mature and rot away in a few days. They fish in the muddy
swollen river to bring up monstrous-looking tropical fish which
they refuse to eat but give to the wild bad-smelling villagers who
surround them the moment they begin operations. They listen to
Tokyo Rose and sometimes, with great luck, get programs
crackling with static from some distant station. They sweat, they
smoke endless cigarettes. They curse a good deal and occasionally

[30]

the Georgia boy goes into the bushes with one of the greasy,
smelly native girls. Color does not seem to trouble this Georgian
when nature presses but even the Sergeant draws the line; he says
it is the smell he cannot stand and the yaws from which most of
the natives suffer.

We read and read and read. I think the war must have taught
many men to make a sustained effort at reading and concentra-
tion who before then had concentrated only long enough to get
through a comic or the baseball score. The Sergeant likes de-
tective stories and can read them over and over again even though
he has long since learned "who dun it." And the Kansas boy just
reads over and over again a book about an American farm. It is,
he says, almost as good as being back there himself.

The dark little Jewish fellow likes mystery stories too, possibly
because lie never read anything before he came into the Army
and into a life in which the principal problem is killing time.
Homer, the wool-hat, doesn't read anything. It may be that the
effort is too great for him. When he is not talking or working
he just sleeps at any hour of the day or night, flat on his Army
cot or, if the day is nice, leaning against a palm tree with his
mouth wide open.

All of it, of course, is escape reading, and most of them regard
the printed page as a kind of magic and hold in the greatest awe
and veneration the writers who can put all that on paper. "GeeP
the Kansas boy will say. "I don't know how he can do it with
only words. You can smell the warm milk and the mint in the
pasture."

None of us has ever been in combat. We are what is left of a
detachment sent here months ago to guard the stores kept in a
row of steel Quonset huts, watching them day and night to see
that the tropical rain doesn't come through the roof and that
none of the natives get in and pilfer the supplies. We are all
just sitting here in time and space, lost for the moment to the
rest of the world. The heat is bad and the continuous Turkish-
bath rains and the insects and the monotony of the food and
the company. We all get on pretty well together and until now

[31 ]

there has never really been a serious quarrel, despite our isolation.
We are all waiting, for what?

The trouble is that here we know we are waiting. There is no
future. We seem to be living suspended in time and space. There
is no interest or activity to distract us. There are no women but
the dirty greasy-haired female savages whom no one but Homer,
the wool-hat, would touch even in extremis. There is no con-
versation, as such. There are only the reminiscences of the
men about their boyhoods or their home towns or their experi-
ences with women which, except for the dark little Brooklynite
and the Kansas farmer, seem to be pretty primitive and in-
discriminate. The Brooklynite has, I gather, never known any
woman but his wife in a marriage not of choice but arranged
between families, and the farm boy has messed around a bit
at picnics and homecomings but I doubt that he has ever had
any complete experience. "Horsin* around/* he calls it. He knows
all the facts of life and he has the girl picked out, and when and
if he gets back he will go through the ceremony and then the
breeding operations.

I haven't much to contribute to such conversations, not because
I am wholly without experience like the Brooklyn boy, but be-
cause my own experience has been on a different level and I
could not discuss it in a fashion which would interest them, even
if I had any inclination to do so. Only two or three times have
I had what might be called "functional" experience on the level
of their rough-and-tumble affairs, and each time the experiences
were unsatisfactory and even unpleasant, so that I find no pleas-
ure in recalling them. A man doesn't discuss his own married life,
and the whole business with Mary Raeburn was no subject for
discussion. I could not talk of it and in any case I doubt that, if
I had, any one of them would have understood what I was talking
about. The Sergeant would have observed that "She must have
been a hell of a good piece" and envied me.

The jungle has a sinister extravagant beauty which, unex-
pectedly, is singularly monotonous. The trees, the ferns, the
strange snakelike lianas and other fantastic tropical growths are

[32 ]

all outsize and seem at times, particularly at night, to have a
life and animation of their own, as if the rustlings you hear in
the darkness were the sound of their growing and reaching out
to overwhelm and smother and devour each other. In the day-
time the birds and the butterflies, drifting through the half light
which is green like deep clear sea water, seem to be flashes of
light.

They are like those flashes of light which sometimes come to
me here when I find my mind working, really for the first time,
when I see people and things clearly even myself and I under-
stand that somehow I have missed the boat all along the line and
this in spite of my having had what you might call every advan-
tage and every opportunity. These flashes of light are as painful
as they are illuminating, and the odd thing is that they are fol-
lowed by a spirit of the blackest depression when I find myself
hoping that the war will go badly for both sides and that there
will be enough destruction so that we may go back to the begin-
ning and start to build a wholly new world. All this serves to
convince me that a man like myself should never really think.
He should go round and round his treadmill until at last he fades
away, or live as the Sergeant does intensely and directly, rather
like an animal who is comfortable and sleeps when his stomach
is filled and his senses and desires put to rest.

All of this separates me in a sense from the other men on the
island, none of whom have ever been corrupted by thought. We
wonder, no doubt (all but Homer, the wool-hat), what goes on
in each other's mind, and even though we live so closely, so
intimately in such spectacular isolation, none of us will ever
really know what goes on in the inner recesses of the other's
mind. The less the mind, I suppose, the less it matters.

The terrible thing is that in our modern world there is so little
place for thought or for its effects, for the mindless multiply far
more rapidly than the intelligent and all the forces which sur-
round us seek to destroy thought, to reduce everything to the
level of codes and brevity, radio and movies, condensations and
predigested pills of information. At home Meyer sits in his tailor's

[ 33]

shop, cross-legged in the old-fashioned way (that's the way he
sits on his Army cot), and he does not think, he does not consider
himself, nor his surroundings, nor his faith, nor the universe. He
is listening to the radio. It does not much matter what the pro-
gram is. It is merely a noise that fills a void. Probably the whole
of his conversation is limited to the baseball score or the latest
gag by a radio comic. He has neither conversation, nor pic-
turesqueness nor any quality whatever. He lives, breeds and dies,
and that is the whole story.

It is not because Meyer is in himself a mediocrity. He has been
made so by the world in which he lives. I think he talks more
here on this beautiful wretched island than he talks at home and
even here he talks very little, but he must think, for one cannot
arrest the working of the mind save by sleep or by perpetual
noise and distraction. I suspect that all of us have done some
thinking we have never done before. Now and then the results
of it burst out in the most unexpected way.

Al has been thinking about his farm and he says, 'When I get
back and can live a decent life again, I'm going to make my farm
the finest in all of Kansas. I've been thinking about it. I know
what I want to do and I've already got plans laid out. It's not
going to be just a good farm. It's goin" to be super. I've got to
make up for all the lost time."

Probably a lot of other boys on other beaches and islands, in
other deserts, are thinking too, for the first time, because there
isn't anything else to do when the detective and mystery stories
run out and can't be read again for the fifth time. So maybe there
is some good or purpose in this idiotic war.

Al has lovable qualities. He starts at you suddenly when an
idea strikes him. It's as if he experienced a kind of wonder at
such an occurrence. He will scratch his head and grow intense
and think on from that idea to another one. I believe he and his
fellow farmers are the only ones who have mastered mechanics
and machinery rather than permitting these things to master
them. To Al, farm machinery is a slave, to be put to use to do
things more quickly and efficiently so that he may get through his

[34]

work and turn to better things. The rest of us are enslaved by
radio, by automobiles and planes and telephones. We tremble
and leave whatever we are doing to answer a telephone, as if we
were slaves who would be punished by torture if we merely sat
and permitted it to ring until it had worn itself out.

There is something supremely idiotic about our position here.
I am the only one who does not wish earnestly, even passionately,
to return home and get on with his life. We have been here
nearly two years and may remain for God knows how long. Why
are we here? To guard a depot of food and supplies which is
slowly rotting away and will, when and if the war is ever finished,
be dumped into the sea or burned, and all around us are these
wretched natives starving in the midst of this mad unhealthy
vegetation. Yet if some martinet should come on inspection to
check on supplies and find that a half-dozen tins of soup were
missing, the discovery could have serious consequences for me,
if not for the others.

All about us among the islands are other men occupied in the
same useless death watch, and here and there are a few hundred
wretched Japs who have escaped and hidden away like shy
animals. They will not come out of the jungle even if you leave
them messages or call to them over loudspeakers to surrender.
We have none here on this island and the nearest island is forty
miles away, so at least we do not have the worry over being
attacked and having our throats cut silently in the middle of the
dark tropical night. Perhaps that might be better. It would make
things a little more exciting ... at least for the other fellows.

I have the excitement of writing all of this down, this search,
this exploration into what I am and how I came to be what I am.
It is like exploring the jungle itself. One goes on and on, deeper
and deeper as one new dim and misty vista opens up into another.
I was tired when I came here but I have been in a sense reborn
by what I am doing. Yet in the back of my consciousness is a
perpetual fear and dread of what will happen when I come to the
end of the exploration. At the moment I am living over again
everything of importance that ever happened to me and it is all

[ 35 ]

new and different because in a way I see it for the first time, as I
could never see it when it was happening. That I suppose is what
disturbed and agonized Faust himself. That is why he wanted to
live it all over again, for the enjoyment and the savor which he
missed the first time he passed that way. Yet there is an enjoy-
ment merely in the whole of the exploration. I have made a new
and interesting acquaintance. I have encountered someone I
never knew before. It is myself.

)U Oakdale

I WAS BORN IN THE TOWN CALLED CRESCENT CITY OF WHICH

the suburb Oakdale is now a part. My birth took place in a large
and rather ornate house with towers and cupolas and plate glass
windows, a very outsize house considering the fact that the city lot
upon which it was placed was only seventy-five feet wide and in
depth not more than a hundred feet. The big house occupied most
of the lot so that it stood very close to the houses on either side,
and in the evening, unless the shades were drawn, it was possible
to see from our windows what went on inside the houses on
either side. I can remember seeing family quarrels taking place
and what in those days was referred to as "spooning." I have seen
fathers strike their children, and even in the case of old Hazeltine,
who late in life married a young bride, I have witnessed as a child
the rather repulsive intimacies of that particular bedroom from
my own second-story bedroom window.

The house was a symbol of many things. It belonged to the era
which lay between the frontier when Crescent City was a village
and the day when, as factories moved in, the village grew to be a
town and then to be a city, and finally the people who once would
have lived on the main street in such a house as ours took to the
suburbs and the main street became a "dead area." In time the
old big ornate houses went unpainted and the dooryards unkempt,
and at last the big trees which once shaded the street were cut

[ 36 ]

down to widen it. The old houses first became boarding houses
and presently went half empty save for one or two which housed
a funeral home or the establishment of a chiropractor or disap-
peared before the enameled front of a shiny filling station. The
day of the old house and the way of living which went with it
passed and the whole neighborhood became "a dead area/* a
phrase which might well describe much of American life.

In the very beginning the houses of the village had been close
together as a protection against the attack of the Indians, the
French, and finally the British. Then as the town grew, the houses
remained close to each other because the only transportation was
by means of horses, and even the rich built houses on small
squares of valuable land within the limits of the city itself. And
when the automobile came and changed the element of space
into that of time, they moved out a little way into suburbs like
Oakdale; but still, even when there was no longer any peril from
attack or any limitations of transportation, they still huddled to-
gether in the suburbs, building their houses on plots only a little
larger than those in the city. Farmers lived on farms and towns-
people lived in towns, but a country house was and still is largely
unknown a house where there might be solitude and wildness
and beauty of a kind that is connected with space and the breath-
ing of the spirit and cannot be found in towns and cities and
suburbs. It was as if the people were always afraid, first of the
Indians and the raiders and afterward of being alone or in any
way different from their neighbors.

The fear of solitude grew, I think, out of the thinness of their
resources and the lack of thought or even the capacity to think.
Never as in Europe did they put walls or hedges about their prop-
erties so that they themselves might have privacy and be spared
the indignity of witnessing, as I did in childhood, unfortunate or
unpleasant things going on in the house next door. They did not
cherish privacy and, like Enid, actually wanted neighbors to know
what was going on within the limits of their own small properties,
and so, in a sense, they developed a kind of falseness related to
play-acting, concerned wholly with the appearance rather than

[37]

the substance, with the fa9ade rather than what lay behind it.
And all of this became a part of the thing which might be called
American culture or civilization, or perhaps more accurately the
lack of both. At any rate, it added up to a kind of sterility and
still does.

In her way Enid is a humble symbol of what I mean. With her
it has become so profound that she play-acts even in bed so that
there is no satisfaction in any relationship with her, physical or
otherwise. In reality she in a way resembles a prostitute who also
play-acts as a part of her profession. There is no way ever of
reaching her in the essence, I mean, or the spirit or the reality,
if indeed by now she has any longer any essence or spirit or
reality. That is why, long ago, I gradually stopped trying to talk
to her about anything whatever the welfare and future of the
children, a political issue, or even the behavior of our neighbors
which is always a source of relaxed and easy gossip. When I tried
I found myself talking, not to a warm and honest human being,
but to an attitude, a pose, a character part in a play, in a setting
behind which there was nothing.

It is an extraordinary thing how the life of a town like Crescent
City and a suburb like Oakdale has ceased to produce "charac-
ters." Among the early pioneers, tough men and women who
knew the satisfaction of building something with their own hands
and minds, their own courage and dignity and self-reliance,
"characters" among old people were so common that they were
very nearly the rule. And even in my childhood there were plenty
of characters in the town -people who lived as they wanted to
live with a certain freedom and even luxury of expression and
action, indifferent to the opinion of others. They made life much
richer for the whole of the community and infinitely more color-
fuL But as I grew older they gradually died off and no new ec-
centrics came to take their places, and both the town and life
itself became much duller until now the whole community at
times seems insufferable since every door in every house admits
or releases people who are just alike in what they believe, in how
they act, in what they think. The odd one, if he occurs, is likely

[ 38 ]

to be shut up or treated as mad. I think it could be said that
eccentricity and "characters" are the measure, as they were in the
eighteenth century, of an independent and dynamic society, a
civilization, or a culture in any nation.

At least three of my grandparents would certainly be regarded
today with pity or alarm as eccentrics. My Grandfather Weber
came from the Palatinate in the Forties at a time when liberty and
independence of thought were of much concern to certain ele-
ments among the German people. He fled into exile in order to
avoid capture and prison because he was one of the leaders in a
movement of revolt against the tyranny of a government which
sought to curtail his freedom and deform his personality, and to
him such things were unsufferable.

He was a heavy, strongly built man who by trade in the old
country had been an ironmonger and blacksmith in a prosperous
way, and until the day he died he spoke with a strong South
German accent. In addition to being extremely skillful and even
an artist in the fashioning of wrought iron in all its forms, he was
also something of a musician, played the trumpet, and sang reg-
ularly in the bass section with the fellow German refugees who
formed a Liederkranz society immediately upon their arrival in
Crescent City. He was the father of seven children, including my
mother, and so far as anyone knows he remained happily faithful
to his wife from the day he married her until she died, at forty-
seven. After that he had some kind of a happy relationship with
a middle-aged milliner named Mrs. Schontz. How far it went I
do not know, but I would suspect that it went all the way. She
was a buxom, blonde woman who made wonderful stmdel which
she always gave us children when we stopped in at the millinery
shop. I do not know why they did not marry, but I remember
hearing as a child some talk of her feeling that she was not
capable of becoming a stepmother to a family of children some
of whom already had children of their own, Also there was talk
of a ne'er-do-well husband who had disappeared and might pos-
sibly return unexpectedly with potential embarrassment to all
concerned.

[39 ]

I do not think any of it mattered very much. Whatever hap-
pened was carried on in a dignified way. There were no bottles
of Bourbon and smooching in the back seat of a car at the country
club. They made each other happy, and on occasion she went
with him to the Liederkranz society and sang with him in the
contralto section of the chorus when the German element did
"The Messiah" each year at Christmas time. And she always su-
perintended the annual beer-garden picnic and reunion of the
old Germans who came over, during the revolutionary troubles,
from Bavaria and the Palatinate.

It was a warm relationship to which nobody, so far as I could
discover, ever objected, even the old man's own children who
always regarded Mrs. Schontz as a friend. She supported herself
through her millinery shop, and the most he ever spent upon her
was to buy a little gift or treat her to beer for the evening. I think
that my grandmother herself would have approved of the rela-
tionship because it made her Caspar happy. Her Caspar was one
of those big strong men who could at the same time be helpless
when it came to small things. Mrs. Schontz looked after him.

When she died he became a lonely old man who actually
cherished his solitude. He refused to come and live with any of
his children and stayed on in the old house where he had lived
the whole of his life. Sometimes he came to meals with our family
and always he carried sweets of some kind in his pocket for the
children. He had worked hard and brought up a large family
comfortably, and when Mrs. Schontz died he said, in his funny
accent, "Sure it would be nice to live with one of you, but I would
be in the way with so many children, and I am old enough now
to deserve solitude. When I want to think I can think. When I
want to remember the happy times I have had and the blessings
God gave me I can sit on the front porch and watch people go by
and call out, 'Good Evening/ and have a beautiful time all by
myself. I have put aside enough savings to live comfortably. I can
even keep my own house clean and neat. When I want company
I can go to the Liederkranz or the beer garden or come and have
supper with one of you."

[40]

He did not want to be "kept." He did not want the state to make
Ms decisions. He did not want to conform. He had been a good
citizen, contributing his share and much more to the general good
of the community. He had no fear of being alone. There was his
music and his ironwork, and as he grew older he carved little
figures out of wood elves and trolls in the South German tradi-
tion, which he painted in bright colors and gave to the children.
Even as a very old man he never "killed time'* until he died. On
the morning my mother found him dead he had been at work
creating something up to the last minute when the Lord called
him. He left behind, not quite finished, an ornament of wrought
iron designed to hold flower pots for the balcony beneath the
turrets and scrollwork of my mother's house.

He was content to die at eighty-one, and it was probably just
as well that he did for I remember, even long ago, when I myself
was old enough to notice such things, that sometimes the children
mimicked his accent as he passed in the street and my cousins
complained that they were ashamed of a grandfather who could
not speak good English. It made him seem different and so re-
flected upon themselves who each day sought more and more to
be as much like everybody else as possible.

But there was another reason, far more profound. He died
before he saw the fiery spirit of the French Revolution, for which
he had made himself an exile from the Rhine country he loved so
much, begin to be transmuted into something else, something
derived from the Marx wnom he had always detested and who
was a materialist and the bitter enemy of the human spirit which
the French Revolution glorified through blood and strife and suf-
fering. He would have resented bitterly the materialism which
ordered him to pay taxes so that he might have an old-age pen-
sion, the materialism which crippled his own independence and
reduced him to the level of men incapable of taking care of them-
selves and their families, which treated him as part incompetent
and part indigent. It was not materialism for which he had con-
spired and fought and been exiled, nor for a state potentially as
tyrannical and much less colorful than the state against which he

[41 ]

had rebelled. He had fought for something quite different which
concerned the dignity rather than the material security of man.
In the New World he had found that freedom which permitted a
man to be a man and live with human dignity, aware of his own
strength and thought and abilities and trustful of the good will
of his neighbors. He did not live long enough to see that right of
freedom and independence begin to fade into commonplaceness
and conformity and the sacrifice of the spirit for which he had
fought, turn into a dull paternalism as vicious and perhaps more
deadening than the old tyranny had been.

My paternal grandparents were of another tradition altogether.
My father's father was already well past middle age when my
father, one of twelve children, was born, so that he seemed im-
mensely old when I knew him as a child. He died when I was
very young, at the age of ninety-three, and had lived through
most of the nineteenth century when the whole country about
Crescent City was transformed from a near wilderness into a
huge and modern industrial community. Despite the great dis-
tance which separated him and me, my memories of him are vivid.
He was a man, I think, who, once seen and known, made an im-
pression as on a photographic plate, which remained forever.

He was a tall, thin, very tough old man who always seemed
younger than his years and was vigorous up until the moment he
died. By blood he was mostly north of Ireland Scottish with some
English blood, and he possessed both the ruggedness of the one
people and the adaptability of both. Essentially he was a pioneer,
but you couldn't make a career out of being a pioneer, and during
the course of his life he had tried his hand at many things. Ap-
parently he would undertake a job and, once it was accomplished,
he would lose interest and set himself at once to another, which
is I suppose a characteristic of the pioneer. As a young man he had
fought in the Indian Wars in the Great Plains and the Southwest
and he had traveled a great deal inside the borders of this country.

He was a great storyteller and his tales of the Southwest had
a passionate interest for me. They were better than any I have
read since, and sometimes, when the memory of those tales re-

[42 ]

turns to me, I feel a great sense of sadness, injury, and loss that
the country he talked of no longer exists and that I never had
the opportunity of knowing it. Of course, the flood-stream beds, the
mountains, the mesas are still there, but the excitement and the
struggle and the perils have gone and everywhere there are shacks
and filling stations and motels. That country has become a
shrunken thing, and to find again a wild country like it one would
have to search the wildernesses of the earth.

I think that more and more most of us suffer from an increasing
claustrophobia. The next town is too near and the distance be-
tween it and our own town is built up with bungalows or their
successors the ranch-type house. Great cities which seemed to
me as a child romantic and distant places are only a few hours
away by plane or even automobile. Europe is too near and Asia
threatens us. More and more we feel a sense of uneasiness at this
mechanically projected process of shrinking the world. More and
more there is a universal and shadowy psychological sense of
alarm and even dread, as if there were no longer enough room in
the world. And all the time there are more and more of us more
Chinese, more Americans, more Russians and the more people
there are, the more complex and difficult become the problems
of the world and consequently our own personal problems.

My paternal grandfather, who was called Colonel Jared Smith,
lived in a free world filled with a sense of space and of boundless
opportunity. He could be an Indian fighter, a settler, a merchant,
a trapper. He could set up a small business which might grow
into a great industry or do any of a hundred adventurous and
fascinating things. We hear much in these times of how the span
of life has been extended and how fewer and fewer people die of
tuberculosis or plague, of how such dread things as syphilis are
cured overnight, of how the weak and handicapped who might
have died are kept alive to go on breeding. We hear about the
great advances in transportation, of plumbing, of radios and tele-
vision. ... I don't know. Maybe it is a better world. But in return
for all of these things we have sacrificed much and have raised
for ourselves, and above all for our children, complexities and

[43 ]

problems which may never be solved and which in the end may
mount up until the heap collapses and thrusts mankind and civi-
lization back again into the Dark Ages. I don't know. What da
you think?

We live in a world of short cuts, many of them brutally contra-
dictory of natural law, yet the whole swarming ant-mass of this
planet is insignificant in relation to the universe and its immu-
table laws.

Anyway, Grandpa Smith had always gone his 'tough way, using
brawn and wit to make for himself a fascinating life, to build and
create, at least in part, the world into which I was born, a world
which even on my entry into life was beginning to become a static
rather than a dynamic world, a world resembling more and more
closely the tight crowded world of Europe where there were too
many people and not enough free land and there has long been
a shortage not of men but of land and space and opportunity.

In any case, I was born into a world very different from that of
the old gentleman Colonel Jared Smith. The look of his world
was in his eye the kind of look one rarely sees in these times save
in the eye of an eccentric hermit, if you can find one. It was at
once a look of peace and of arrogance. There was in it the fierce
independence that is in the eye of the eagle but beyond that there
was the look of peace which is in the eyes of people who have
lived full rich lives and, when old, find peace and no regrets
either for the things they have done or have not done. It is the
kind of look one finds in the eyes of people who have discovered
that in old age there is a richness, a quiet satisfaction they never
attained earlier in life. They are the people who have lived, you
might say, in rhythm, completing the full arc of man's existence
from fiery ascending youth through the solid accomplishments of
middle age into the quiet, peaceful decline toward death. They
are not people who dread death or struggle to evade it, for their
lives have been complete, rounded out, and realized like a great
work of art. They have never feared life or denied it. They do not
welcome death through frustration and despair but because they
have fulfilled their cycle with richness and satisfaction. How few
of them there are in our times!

[44 ]

He was a great horseman and as an old man lie rode an old
spotted mare which he had brought from the West twenty years
earlier. Actually he died while riding her and was found dead in
the fields of his farm lying on the ground with one hand holding
the reins. She was not a pretty "beast. She was heavily built and
had a Roman nose but she was smart and looked after the old
man. They were devoted to each other, and she ran loose like a
dog about the farmhouse. When he died she was never able to
understand that he had gone away and this time was not coming
back. In the summer mornings she would come to the back door
and neigh as she had done hundreds of times before, but he was
no longer there to give her an apple or a lump of sugar. She died
during the following winter, perhaps of old age, perhaps out of
loneliness. We could never quite explain to her what had
happened.

This grandfather had great good luck in his wife. He had found
her in California where her father operated as a rancher on one
of the last Spanish grants. She had Spanish blood which showed
in her dark hair and black eyes, and it is not impossible that
there was some remote Indian blood in her. She was very trim and
very spry, even as an old lady, and she was a wonderful cook. I
think it is by her cooking that I remember her arid I know of no
better way by which to remember anyone. The children always
liked going out to the farm for meaLs since the food was excellent
and of great variety, including even Spanish and Mexican dishes
which seemed very hot until we got used to them. She must have
been very handsome as a girl with her brilliant black eyes and
firm full-breasted figure and trim ankles.

In any case, she seemed always to have been in love with my
grandfather, and I suspect that the basis of the love on both sides
was founded on complete physical satisfaction in each other.
From that stemmed in turn tenderness, devotion, self-sacrifice,
understanding, and even common interests. It is on the physical
side, which is usually the foundation of any lasting love affair or
marriage, that so many marriages in the world I have known have
failed, because this part of the marriage has been a bungled and
unsatisfactory operation without abandon, or ecstasy, or complete

[ 45]

surrender. It is, all too often, a messy affair brought about by
physiological pressures with urgent brutality on the one side and
a contrived and patient endurance on the other. And so comes
divorce or that dreary limited compromise which is varied only
by sordid adventures on the side.

My grandmother's name was Pilar, a pretty name, and she
always encouraged the impression that my grandfather not only
dominated her but bullied her. He was always ordering her about
saying, "Pilar, do this," or, "Filar, do that/' She usually did it in
her own good time, if it suited her, and all the while it was she
who in reality ran everything. She kept charge of the money and
took care alike of his children and his investments when he went
away on one of his long trips. She ran the house and the farm
and the livestock, patiently and with satisfaction, until he re-
turned, when there was a turbulent reunion lasting for days from
which there inevitably resulted still another child.

She appeared a little strange in Crescent City and the surround-
ing countryside, and I think that always most people looked upon
her as alien. There was always a Latin elegance about her car-
riage, in her habit of dressing nearly always in bkck and white,
and even about the way she kept her house. Whether she was
aware that she seemed strange I cannot say, but if so it did not
appear to trouble her. The odd thing was that, although she had
been brought up as a Catholic and a Spanish one at that, her
children had contact with no particular faith save that whenever
it became necessary to have the services of a clergyman, the
Presbyterian preacher was summoned. She did not appear to miss
the consolations of religion perhaps because she lived very close
to nature and the animals, both wild and domestic, on the farm
which next to my grandfather was the most important thing in
her life. These two elements, together with her children, made up
the whole of her existence.

She died suddenly of a stroke a little over a year after my
grandfather was found dead beside his mare. None of the children
seemed to have inherited either her taste for country life or my
grandfather's wild restlessness, and presently the farm which we

[ 46 ]

all called "Pilar's Farm'* was sold. The old buildings have been
long since torn down and no memory or even physical vestige of
the place remains. The fields have long since been broken up into
suburban lots and the farm is a part of the fashionable suburb of
Oakdale. My own house is not far from the site of the old farm
house.

Biologists tell us that we do not inherit directly from our
parents, who are merely the carriers of seed, but from our four
grandparents, and this may account for the fact that none of
Pilar and the Colonel's own children seemed to inherit their
tastes. They were all on the whole respectable and commonplace
and conventional. It may also account for the fact of my own
restlessness and frequent melancholy. With Pilar and the Colonel
the restlessness, the physical passion, the color, and the delight
in purely physical things were all realized and satisfied. With me
these things have been suppressed and frustrated, partly by cir-
cumstance and partly perhaps simply by my own weakness and
indecision.

It raises the old question between inheritance and environment
about which there seems to be no really definite decision. I only
know that at times I can somehow feel Pilar and the Colonel in
my blood, in wild but suppressed and concealed outbursts of
disgust and frustration, and on those occasions when in my mind
I considered secretly the easiest and quickest way of getting rid
of Enid altogether,

Enid, of course, never knew of these secret plottings, when in
a vicarious way, entirely in the imagination, I destroyed in a sin-
gle wild explosion all of my Oakdale life, killed her, escaped, and
lost myself forever. Nor do I think that she ever suspected what
I was thinking and even plotting since that kind of violence was
something quite beyond her understanding. It was her way to go
on patching and compromising and pretending. Well, that is what
I did too because I could never bring myself to act and could find
no way out until the war came along and dropped me here on a
steaming tropical island as far from Oakdale as it is possible to
be in this world.

[47 ]

My own father was as little like his parents as it was possible
to be, unless it could be said that he inherited something of
Pilar's sense of stability and outward orderliness. The only in-
heritance left by Pilar and the Colonel was the farm and the
. livestock and machinery which went with it, so their children had
very largely to make their own way, and my father got a job early
in life in the office of old Mr. Hargreaves who had the first and
the biggest insurance agency in Crescent City. As the city had
grown and the country developed, his insurance business became
immensely lucrative, and when he died he left it jointly to a
nephew and to my father to whom he had taken a fancy. So at
thirty my father was very well off with a business which he liked
and for which he had a talent.

In some ways my father was the perfect small-town Middle-
Western businessman of his time. He belonged to half a dozen
fraternal organizations. He helped to organize the first Rotary
Club of the town. He was a regular attendant of the Presbyterian
church. He knew nearly everyone in the town and few had a bad
word to speak against him. He was outwardly a good husband
and definitely he liked his children although he never came very
near to them. Whether he ever loved his wife or not I do not
know. He must have married old Caspar's daughter out of love
since when the old German's estate was settled she inherited only
a few hundred dollars.

How long that love or the desire which accompanied it endured
I do not know. I was the third child, and by the time I was old
enough to be aware of such things there was very little evidence
of love or even affection between my parents. It was not that they
quarreled or even showed any evidence of disliking each other.
They simply went their own ways, seeing each other at meals
morning and evening and sharing until he died a large double
bed. They spoke to each other occasionally but they never con-
versed. Exchange of words was commonplace and habitual but
I never remember their showing any great interest in each other
or any interest in what the other was doing or saying. In all their'

[48 ]

conversations there was never the slightest evidence of an idea or
of any thought.

My mother is still alive, a solid rather square-built woman with
the heavy reliable energy which came down to her through my
German grandfather. Most people would call her handsome. She
should, I think, have been the head of a great business or engi-
neering corporation and perhaps in these days would have held
an executive position or even have founded a business of her own.
But when she was eighteen there was no place for a woman to go,
and so she married my father, which seemed the obvious thing
to do. He was good-looking, three years older than herself, and
very well off with an insurance business which was about as
solid as anything could be. I do not know how much they were
in love with each other or indeed do I know what love is because
it can be so many different things to so many different people.
Certainly neither of them was very hot-blooded or passionate, or
at least neither of them seemed ever to have discovered either
passion or desire. That, I suppose, is how it is with many people
who live lives which are like a pudding without salt or sugar or
spices.

They were what are called good citizens. They were prosperous.
They had three well-behaved and satisfactory children. I suspect
that the family was limited to three not because of any effort at
birth control but simply because my parents lost interest in each
other. I think that both of them missed much in life and that,
partly aware of this, they lost themselves and partially cured their
frustrations by becoming frantically Tbusy."

My father went early to the office and came home late. He was
away a great deal on business trips. I think he really loved the
immense files and the complicated forms that went with the
insurance business. All this did not make him either a very atten-
tive father or a very interesting one. Until he died he always
seemed something of a stranger to me, and even now I find myself
thinking of him not as "Father" or "Dad" or "Pop" but simply as
"Mr. Insurance Man." His business constantly grew and finally
he bought out his partner, the nephew of the man who had be-

[49 ]

friended him and who preferred hunting and fishing to insurance.
The partner took a smaller house and presently a small farm and
sold some farm insurance on his own, enough to keep his wife,
himself, and his five children, and gradually he became half -for-
gotten by the town in which his uncle had been one of the richest
men and one of its most prominent citizens. When people thought
or spoke of him it was to say, 'Isn't it a pity the way Tom Har-
greaves has gone downhill? It would certainly be a disappoint-
ment to his uncle."

Sometimes, because one of his boys was about my age and a
friend of mine, I went to stay at their small farm for a few days.
Everything went wild there, including the children. We camped
out, scared at night by the rustling sounds made by the wild
animals and the calls of the screech owls, and in summer the
swimming hole behind the house was our bathtub. Tom Har-
greaves may have gone downhill, but he certainly had more fun
than my father ever had and he gave fun and excitement to many
other people.

After such a visit I always returned home saddened and filled
with wistfulness because I always wished I had a father like him.

My mother was a good housekeeper and we were able to afford
a cook, a "day" girl, and a laundress in the big house with the
towers and the fretwork. She did little housework herself and
actually disliked it. Most of her heavy energy went into her
women's club activities and into raising charity funds and attend-
ing conventions. The house was always well kept and the food
good, but there was a sterile emptiness about it and an almost
total lack of warmth and never any excitement at all. It was as if
we were all hypnotized, paralyzed, and embalmed in material
security, order, and convention, in a big ugly house on a seventy-
five-foot lot.

My mother was fair and just and a good disciplinarian when
she was with us, and we three children grew up to be a well-
mannered lot and extremely conventional, but I think now that
all three of us married very early in life simply in the half -con-
scious hope of having a "home." What we had had all our lives

[50]

was a comfortable, even luxurious house and good food, but none
of us had ever had a home. It was only when we went on a visit,
as I used to go to Hargreaves* farm, that we understood what it
was that we did not have.

Yet despite her apparent indifference and her preoccupation
with other things, my mother exercised over us an iron control.
She always "knew better" than anyone else, including ourselves,
what was good for us, and she somehow, in her spare time, man-
aged to get us all married to "suitable" mates of what were con-
sidered good families and which she described as 'Veil situated/*
In this she displayed her powers as a manager and an executive,
and long afterward I came to realize that she was as much re-
sponsible for my marriage to Enid as I myself was.

She managed this in a hundred small ways by praising Enid,
by throwing tis together, by rather backhanded hints about our
being suited to each other, and by suggesting that it would be a
perfect match. I think she would not have objected if I had got
Enid into trouble so that a shotgun wedding would have been
necessary. Of course such a thing with Enid would have been
quite impossible unless Enid had found a man who was abso-
lutely indispensable to her future security and position, and then
it would never have been the result of passion or deception but
of calm calculation on her part. It was the marriage my mother
wanted to bolster up her own sense of success and perfection and
help complete the planned pattern of what to her was a satis-
factory existence. Now, as a still powerful and firm old lady,
revered as past president of the American Federation of Women's
clubs and honorary member of the Lord knows how many other
women's organizations, she can look back with satisfaction upon
a life which she ordered and planned from the very beginning.

She failed only in the cases of two of her children. My sister's
husband is a hopeless and partly secret drunkard, and it is
scarcely possible for a man's marriage to have been more drearily
unhappy than my own eventually became. These failures, how-
ever, did not disturb her for she simply refused to recognize
them. When once or twice my sister tried to discuss the tragedy

[51]

of her husband, my mother simply turned her off by saying,
"Let's not discuss it, my dear. We all have our problems and you
have yours. You must try a little harder to make him happy and
he will forget about drinking. I always managed in my own life
to iron out these little difficulties and I think I can say that I
succeeded." What was a great tragedy she treated as little more
than an annoyance.

In this attitude she was not too different from many of the
American women of her generation, or indeed men as well, for it
is a great trait of Americans to believe what they want to believe
or to ignore or distort any truth which may be disagreeable.

They are, I think, as fearful of facing the truth as they are of
being alone, and the two fears are inevitably linked and blended,
since it is when one is alone that the truth is faced and revealed,
and so they hunt in packs and move in crowds and attend con-
ventions and drink themselves into the sleep which is a little like
the death they await while marking time in emptiness.

And so my sister had to bear alone the burden of her husband's
tragedy of disintegration which began, I think, when his parents
forced him to become a lawyer something he never wanted to
be but which was in the family tradition. And so he was a bad
lawyer and a failure and ashamed before the wife whom he sin-
cerely loved. He drank because whatever he did was a frustra-
tion and against his nature.

My brother, happily, married a girl from Seattle and so went
far off to live and seldom returned to the East. So far as I know
they are happy, but he showed little desire ever to see his parents
again after his marriage.

So far as the trouble between Enid and myself, I have never
discussed the matter with my mother, but she knows, I am sure>
the misery of the household. But she ignores it and only con-
tributes to the fiction of our perfect suburban life as the "finest
type of American family." I have overheard her saying as much
on more than one occasion when she knows perfectly well that
it is not the truth.

It is very difficult to describe my mother or give her any par-

[52 ]

ticular character because in some respects she was and is like a
machine with an incredible power of riding over everything and
everybody. She accomplishes this without any violent struggle or
even intrigue but always quietly and almost sweetly, as if the
crushing effect of her passing over you like a steam roller were
good for you. Always, of course, she has operated in the tradition
of the "accepted thing" so that she has behind her the vast power
of convention., of conformity, of a crushing mediocrity.

She is now a venerated, distinguished, respected character in
the community and even in a small way in the nation. She has
very white hair which, with her rather cold blue eyes and high-
colored complexion, makes her very handsome and "aristocratic-
looking" a common phrase and description which belongs with
the 'lovely homes'" and "gorgeous drapes" and "occasional chairs"
school of formula and vulgarity. Two things subtract from any
look of genuine distinction. One is her taste for fussy dresses and
elaborate hats. The other is the pince-nez which she always wears
attached to a fine gold chain that snaps in and out on a spring
from a gold button attached to her broad bosom. These two
things rather give her away. In one sense she could in her prime
have posed for a composite portrait of the typical middle-aged
middle-class American woman of lier era.

She belonged, and as long as she lives will still belong, to a
particular era in the development of American sociology, and the
key to her story is that very likely she should never have married
at all but have gone into business, a thing that was very nearly
impossible in her time. Today it is quite different. Such a woman
can undertake a career and either never marry at all or marry
and relegate her family to the second position of importance in
her life and thus be able to avoid many frustrations and small
deceptions and hypocrisies. Although my mother has been very
active all her life, there was never any sense of adventure in her,
nor any real fire. Her Me was satisfactory, according to her lights,
and dull, and she, so help me God, was the dullest thing in it.
Before I was fifteen years old I knew that she was a dreadful bore.
Now in her old age, since she has come to consider herself a

[53]

"character" and to demand reverence and attention, she has be-
come insufferable.

It is true too that she lived toward the end of an era in which
the frontier was passing and in which women were scarce and
simply under the law o supply and demand, if for no other rea-
son, became desirable. It gave all women, unattractive or other-
wise, a great advantage. It gave rise to the absurd fashion of
placing all women either on a pedestal or in the gutter. There
was nothing in between and no allowance made for the mixed-up
thing which most women are, part mother, part bitch, part
beauty, part ugliness. This mixed-up quality is what makes
women charming and interesting, but the women of my mother's
generation and situation were not allowed to be mixed up. They
were aR supposed to be pure and virtuous and motherly whether
they were or not, and most of them spent their lives in giving a
performance of all of these things. Not only did it make them
dull and false; it turned them into hypocrites who practiced their
bitcheries never openly but secretly and in a veritable web of
intrigue. Sweetness of nature was rarely genuine; it was usually
the sugar coating on a bitter pill of frustration and envy and
baffled ambition. Of course Enid, in her more subtle way, was a
remote product of this same tradition.

Motherhood, a physical fact, arrived at often enough bitterly
and unwillingly or by accident, was a sacred word, regardless of
whether the mother neglected her home, tortured her husband, or
devoured her children after first deforming their lives. Good
mothers are purely accidental and they are rare enough. It is a
pity that the word "mother" suffered the debasement it experi-
enced during most of American sociological history- Things have
begun to change, and it is gradually becoming recognized that
many mothers are merely monsters. There is nothing sacred about
the fruition of the act of copulation. It depends upon what a
woman makes of such a situation.

I have been able to avoid my mother pretty well for the last
ten years, but there were the inevitable yearly visits which for-
tunately could not last for long since it was impossible for two

[ 54 ]

such women as herself and Enid to stay for long under the same
roof without a violent explosion. Fortunately my mother never
stayed more than a week, but at the end of that time the tension
between the two women, aggravated perhaps by my own corrod-
ing inward misery and weakness, became unbearable. In a Latin
country like France such an atmosphere would have led to
physical violence and even perhaps murder. The nearest it ever
came to violence was that furious quarrel when they joined forces
against me. I know now that the only thing which prevented
violence in our house was the composite pattern of illusion and
play-acting in which both women lived* Enid wanted always to
be able to say > "I don't understand mother-in-law trouble. I get
on so well with mine. I think the solution is fundamentally based
on our attitude toward each other/' . . . then with a smile, as if
she were saying something witty and original, "You know, bear
and forbear/' And my mother wanted always to be able to say,
"My daughter-in-law is utterly devoted to me. When I visit her
the place is turned over to me. Nothing is too good for Grand-
mother/'

In the presence of strangers or friends who dropped in, the
performance between the two women could only be described
as ^revolting." They fell into their roles and really "hammed"
and "mugged" them. Each built up the othe/s act with "dears"
and "darlings" as thick in their conversation as currants in a bun.
Then the moment the door closed on the visitors, the overani-
mated, falsely eager faces drooped again and a kind of bristling
like that of two hostile bitches circling each other came into the
atmosphere.

Of course I caught it both ways. Enid, throughout the visit,
would keep saying to me, "You know, darling, your mother is a
wonderful woman but she is a great trial. She's so used to being
the center of everything and running everything. I'm always so
tired by the time she leaves that I could lie down and die" (the
very last thing indestructible Enid would ever dream of doing).

And on my mother's side, I would get, "It's a pity Enid doesn't
show more interest in cultural things. I never thought she'd turn

[55]

out this way when you married her. She seems to think only of
neighborhood gossip and the housekeeping. She has plenty of
help. Why doesn't she manage them so that she doesn't have to
spend all her time house-cleaning? It's very difficult to talk with
her about anything serious. I don't see how a woman could have
spent four years at college and come out with so little/'

Of course during the annual visit I had to give up altogether
the luxury of my solitude behind the locked door of the rumpus
room. If I attempted to escape I was persecuted by both of them
with hints and hurt looks and implications of an almost sinister
sort. In short they ganged up on me in a bitter and unholy al-
liance. And I was weak enough to be concerned about the horror
involved in the spectacle of the two of them sitting over my head
alone together in the sitting room, hating each other and making
nasty remarks. Even if I had tried to escape to the rumpus room,
I could not have accomplished anything because the picture of
the whole thing would have been in the back of my mind, dis-
turbing me and upsetting any attempt to think or put anything on
paper.

So I would sit there with them, usually playing records on the
player as loudly as possible in order to make conversation diffi-
cult and try meanwhile to get a little reading done. And presently
my mother would rise and suggest that it was time to go to bed
and perhaps that both Enid and I would be the better for a little
more sleep and a few less cocktails. Enid would never give in and
go to bed first. By the time the evening broke up I was much too
exhausted to think of going back to the rumpus room and find a
little solitude. I merely did what was expected of an American
husband approaching middle age who has no longer any interest
in his wife go upstairs to a single bed next to hers as if they were
going to bed to perform the marital act, as if either of them still
wanted to. The mere thought of my occupying a separate room
while my mother was in the house was, of course, unthinkable to
Enid, who wanted my mother to feel that it was Enid who had
possession of me now and that we were still passionately in love
with each other something we never were,

[56 ]

Of course all of this came partly from my own weakness, but
essentially I am a man who likes peace and wants people to like
each, other and get on well together rather than to corrode the
whole of their spirits and everybody else's spirits by intrigues
and envy and jealousy and hatred and that horrible desire to
possess and devour others which is popularly called "sharing
everything." The odd thing, which I have never been able to
understand, is that the two women actually seemed to find pleas-
ure and satisfaction in hating each other.

It was curious that, despite my mother's immensely "successful"
life, her mouth turned down sharply at the corners and there was
a line almost like a gash from her nostrils to the corners of her
mouth. As Enid grew older, her mouth too began to turn down
at the corners and the same line like a gash began to develop. It
is very common with American women of middle age upward. Of"
all the lines which come into the human face with increasing age,
this is the ugliest and most frightening, for it comes from an inner
and carefully hidden torment and an unhappiness and frustration
which is terrifying to contemplate*

I have gone at some length into my ancestry, for ancestry and
inheritance are of course an immense part of all of us. We do not
perhaps inherit acquired characteristics but we certainly do in-
herit glands and physiological factors which tend to reproduce
the same traits which have been observed in an ancestor. We can,
for example, initerit a bad liver and develop the traits of most
other people with bad livers or a thyroid weakness which makes
us more or less like all other people with thyroid weaknesses. To
be sure, the variety of the combinations of inherited genes and
factors are enormous, but some still follow through from one's
sources of inheritance.

Like most Americans, my own blood came from many races and
subdivisions of races. In that respect I could scarcely be more
typical in a biological sense of what is today called an American.
My background of ancestors and of the culture and civilization
of their times could scarcely be more conventional. All of these
things produced me and some other millions of American men

[57]

very like me. I am forced to examine all these things to find some
answer to who and what I am and why I come to find myself
now on a remote tropical island with a sense of failure and the
desire each night, when I turn in on a damp hot Army cot, never
to waken again.

IV Jhe Jungle

I ONIGHT THE SERGEANT CAME IN AND WANTED TO PLAY GIN

rummy. J knew it was coming on because he has been restless and
nervy all day, almost as if he were afraid of himself. Gin rummy
and poker and pinochle are the only games he knows. None of the
others knows anything about cards but Meyer, the little dark fel-
low from Brooklyn, and I fancy he finds little pleasure in playing
away from his family and his own special friends in Brooklyn.
The muggy solitude and boredom of the island simply drive him
deeper and deeper into himself and he spends hours lying on his
cot under the mosquito netting in what I am certain are veritable
orgies of brooding and self-pity.

Homer, the wool-hat Georgia boy, simply sleeps, eats, and goes
off into the bushes with one of the black greasy native women
with sores on their legs. He has to be kept dosed up with peni-
cillin against yaws most of the time. When he talks it is mostly
about how the Yankees don't understand the "nigger problem"
or of the times he took part in "nigger hunts."

Al, the Kansas farm boy, tries to fight off boredom by reading
books and farming on the small patch of ground cleared out of
the frightening, ever-crowding jungle. At this he does a very good
job, keeping us in fresh vegetables which are large and flamboy-
ant and quick-growing but rather tasteless. He and Meyer take
turns with the cooking and sometimes I put my hand in, a thing
normally regarded as reprehensible on the part of an officer, but
I like to eat well and I learned to be a pretty good cook at the
backyard barbecues in Oakdale. I do not think it hurts my pres-

[58 ]

tige as an officer. I never have any trouble with the boys, and of
course I always have the Sergeant to back me up with strong-arm
methods if necessary. I have to restrain him sometimes in dealing
with wool-hat Homer for whom he feels a contempt which he
shows by occasionally giving Homer what he calls a good "going-
over." Probably it does no harm since that is the only kind of
thing Homer understands, but it sometimes seems to me unfair
since the Sergeant is a bruiser and Homer a poor weedy specimen
of Southern white trash, undernourished all of his life on a diet
of fat pork and combread, grown on miserably poor land, worn
out under three hundred years of wretched agriculture. Homer is
the only one who ever mentions little Meyer's being a Jew.

Commonly the Sergeant refers to Homer as the Rat, and he is
right, but in a way you can't help feeling sorry for Homer because
the others dislike him so much. Yet there isn't much to be done
about it. If you try to talk to him about the virtues of cleanliness
or of responsibility or of one's duty toward others, you get no-
where at all. He simply doesn't understand what you are talking
about and, what is worse, he wouldn't care even if he understood.
He never reads but looks at the paper comic books by the hour,
apparently finding pleasure in them no matter how many times he
has seen them. He said once that he did not get the full pleasure
out of them until he had gone over them three times,

I have tried to imagine what it was like in his own community
back in the hills of Georgia and what sort of position he occupied
there, but I never get much out of him. I suspect that back there
he was a loud-mouthed bully, but the Army has long since taught
him that the same tactics do not work outside his own small com-
munity and he has come to adopt the one other alternative of the
bully a hangdog, whining manner. Now and then there comes
into his eyes a curious cornered, desperate, vicious look which
gives me a terrifying indication of what he might be like on a
"nigger hunt."

I don't know what there is to be done about such specimens as
Homer or the people in the background out of which he came.
Certainly they cannot be cured overnight no matter how many

[ 59 ]

"do-gooders" undertake the job or how much money is spent on
them. Behind him the trail of poverty and prejudice, ignorance
and bad nutrition and possibly even incest, is too long and too
intricate. If there are forgotten men in America they are Homer
and his relatives, who are worse off than the pitiful Negroes from
the same kind of poverty-stricken sordid background, for in
Homer's kind there is no merriment and little emotion other than
hatred and bitterness. I had never known his sort until I came
into the Army, for they do not exist anywhere near Crescent City
or even anywhere at all in my own prosperous northern state. I
had read about them, but that was a pale experience compared
to the reality. They are a contradiction of the pure Mendelians.
The original genes, as many sentimentalists suppose, may have
been of the finest Anglo-Saxon stock (a theory which I believe
can be heavily discounted, especially in Georgia), but something
certainly has deformed them a mixture of poverty and sordid-
ness and poor diet continuing through generations.

But enough of Homer, although he is for me a perpetually
fascinating if loathsome study. Even the fact that he is heartily
disliked by all of us does not seem to disturb him.

The five of us, so dissimilar, manage to get on pretty well
despite steaming rains and bugs and boredom, and I have been
able to maintain my prestige and discipline. Perhaps this is be-
cause I have been completely and utterly objective, removed from
all of them and very nearly as impartial as God himself should be.
Of course, the backing of the Sergeant is important, just as a
police force is important in a world in which mankind is still not
sufficiently civilized to do without one, as the Anarchists propose.
The Sergeant holds me a little in awe because I can read and can
write and speak passable English. Sometimes he scratches his
head and declares openly his regret that he quit in the eighth
grade of the Roxbury, Massachusetts, schools.

My four companions in this morose green hell are as dissimilar
in appearance as in character. Meyer is small and dark with great
liquid eyes which seem perpetually filled with unshed tears. His
beard is very heavy and blue-black whether freshly shaven or not.

[60]

He is very orthodox and will eat no food cooked on Saturday,
observes Friday prayers, and I think would like a masusah at-
tached to the door to kiss as he goes in or out of the Quonset hut.

Homer, the wool-hat, is lean and sallow with very small cold
blue eyes and sandy hair and a skin that never tans but merely
turns red and is covered with freckles. He has a rather squashed
nose, which may have come from some fight, and a large loose
mouth with uneven teeth usually stained with tobacco juice.

Only Al, the Kansas farm boy, has any pretensions at good
looks, and these pretensions are certainly wholly unconscious.
He is a well-built boy, with a very clean look always, as if he had
just come out of the shower. He is rather like the photographs of
"the healthiest Four-H boy in the state." There is nothing of the
"hick" in him, but there is a kind of profound simplicity in his
approach to life and a good deal of genuine innocence. He is a
"nice ?> boy, as the ladies would say. He performs his tasks effi-
ciently and has a genuine talent and love for the earth. He does
not seem to be homesick, but the farm in Kansas is his idea of
paradise and he wants the war to be over quickly so that he can
go back there.

As for the Sergeant whose name is Dennis Burke, I thought as
I sat playing gin rummy with him tonight that he might well be
called, "The Male Principle." If it is true, as many psychiatrists
claim, that there is no such thing as the absolute male or the
absolute female but that we are all only in varying degree com-
binations of male and female, then the Sergeant would come
pretty close to the extreme male end of the yardstick.

He is not very tall and is immensely muscular. It is difficult to
discover where his chest ends and his stomach begins, but there
is no fat on him. He is just thick-bodied and heavy with big feet
and hands with fingers like clusters of sausages which are never-
theless extremely and surprisingly deft in performing delicate
operations and putting things together. He is in charge of the
medicine department, and when Homer, the wool-hat, got his
head bashed open somehow on one of his night prowls, the Ser-
geant washed and sewed up the scalp wound with as delicate a

[ 61 ]

touch as that of any expert nurse or surgeon. He is very hairy
with a kind of beard sprouting from the top of his undershirt,
and the dark hair on his head is rough and almost bristly. It is
difficult for him to say "Yes" grammatically. In my presence he
makes a desperate attempt to speak correctly and falls into the
vulgar overelegance of the people who say, 'lie asked he and F
to do something or other. Also, like the classic sergeant, he has a
fine vocabulary of elaborate profanity. We get on very well to-
gether and I think he likes me, although I clearly puzzle him. In
his brutal directness he cannot understand all the inhibitions, the
conventions, the restraints, the hypocrisies of the life which has
complicated the whole of my character and existence. With him
there are no reticences about what he thinks or what he does
even to the most intimate details of his experiences with sex in
almost all its forms. I puzzle him because he cannot make out
whether I am without experience or whether I simply prefer not
to discuss such things. He is further puzzled by the fact that I
do not seem to disapprove of his behavior. He has been used to
lectures with slides, warnings, and moral exhortations from chap-
lains, Y.M.C.A. workers, and "P.I." officers, none of which has,
of course, made any impression whatever upon his behavior.

When, he plays rummy he plays with all his might. If he loses
he is depressed and if he wins everything is fine for the next
twenty-four hours. He seems to forget even about women. So
whenever possible I let him win. I think he feels that victory over
me is a real triumph, much better than defeating Al, because I
have been to college.

Tonight he seemed to be in a particularly good mood perhaps
because we shared between us part of a bottle which I managed
to have sent on to me along with some other things.

He said, <e l don't know what the hell we're doing out here.
I only hope that they don't forget us when the war is over and
leave us here forever. Sometimes I think I'm just dreaming all
this and it ain't happening at all. It shouldn't happen to a dog."

As long as he has something for his hands to do he is fairly
happy, but when he finishes a tinkering job and is at a loss for

[62]

one to follow it lie gets into a bad temper and is likely to give
Homer a "working-over" or make derisive remarks to poor little
Meyer who just wants to be left alone to feel sorry for himself.
I am probably the happiest of all because I have time and am
resting, and out of all this thinking and writing I am doing the
same kind of tinkering job which Dennis does when he is putting
together some new Rube Goldberg contraption. Only my tinker-
ing is steady and consistent and continual and doesn't, like his,
come to an end so that I have to think up something else.

When I think of Dennis it occurs to me that it would be a
good thing if half our colleges were turned into trade schools
where boys could learn to use their hands (and their brains)
in creating new mechanical marvels so worshiped in our civiliza-
tion. But there is still a lag from the nineteenth century and the
frontier which induces most people to think that what is called
a "college education" is not only important but indispensable.
The country is filled with engineers and lawyers who are un-
wanted and can't make a living and are unhappy when they
might be infinitely more prosperous and happy with a machine
shop or honestly working a good farm. And there is the whole
residue of the 'liberal arts college" graduates, most of whom
add up to nothing in so far as learning and culture are con-
cerned. After Dennis, well oiled, finally went to bed, I lay under
the mosquito netting for a long time thinking about myself and
how I had never found out what it was I really wanted to do.

Every now and again the rain would come down, in torrents,
as if someone had opened a gigantic water tap, and in the
moments between the deluges the night was unnaturally still so
that you could seem to hear the jungle breathing, and above
the soft breathing there would be the sound of faint rustlings and
the occasional raucous cry of a bird or some tree animal. It is
these sounds, this mystery, this hostile terrifying feeling of the
awful jungle fertility, which binds us all together far more than
any other factor in our existence. In the end, of course, it will
have a disastrous effect upon some one of us, if for no other
reason than because each day we seem a little more lost and

[ 63 ]

remote from all the rest of the world, as if all restraint, all con-
vention, no longer applied here, as if we had to start all over at
the beginning of things to create a society and manners and
civilization and devise ways and means of living with each other
without violence or murder. I do not know how long it can last
without trouble of some kind. I am better off perhaps than the
others because I have gone backward into the past.

The odd thing is that even after months of this monotony I
am happy here and most of the time I am alone and I have time
to exist and to be. Most of us have no conception of what time
is. The man back home whizzing along the road by motor or
in the air by plane from one town to another thinks he is saving
time, but when he gets to his destination he merely starts out
whizzing off to the next objective. The man riding a horse or
driving in a buggy along the same road in the past had much
more time, for he could think and reflect and doze and grow in
his mind, in his spirit, and in his soul. This is the first time in
many years I have had time, and there is no one preying upon
me to do this or that, to play golf or to drink, to go to conventions
or any number of meaningless things. There is no one who wants
to "share" me. The boys here don't prey upon me. They are
friendly enough but I think they consider me a bore.

The tired feeling has been dissipated a little. Now and then
I feel a faint desire to return to Oakdale and see my friends and
live again in the house with the dull rich "drapes" and Enid
constantly emptying the ashtrays and flicking up invisible bits
of dust or cigarette ash from her precious carpets and chairs.
But it is never Enid I want to see. I know now that everything
concerned with Enid is finished. I would like to see the children
and my bit of garden at the back of that suburban plot. By now
the hedge must have grown high enough to shut out the eyes
of the Burdens who live on one side and the Prescotts who live
on the other, so that I could go there and lie in the hammock
and read in the certainty that someone was not watching me
out of a neighboring window every time I scratched myself. Of
course there would always be Enid coming out at once to join

[64]

me with her mending and sit near me so that she could "share"
everything, even the beauty and solitude of this little corner
which I think she actually dislikes.

When I planted the hedge, she didn't like it. She said she
thought it was unfriendly, like a spite fence. It is not impossible
that when I return home I shall not find it has grown but that
she has in my absence dug it up because it prevented her from
calling across to the Prescotts or the Burdens whenever she felt
like it and because it prevented her from seeing what they were
doing and sharing that too.

But perhaps I shall never return home. I don't know. If it
were not for the children, there would be no question. I would
not return. Children anchor you down because they are a part
of you and because you have a responsibility toward them. But
with me there is a third reason that I am afraid of what Enid
will do to them, of how she may limit them and warp the fabric
of the rest of their lives by forcing them into the pattern of her
own shallow, superficial world in which the greatest terror is
of thought or of solitude.

In these times it is little use to work hard in order to save
money to leave to one's children. With taxes you can't save very
much, and even if you put it into insurance the government
takes most of it from them when you die in order to use it for
other people who need bureaucrat's jobs or are shiftless or lazy
or improvident. So you kill yourself to make money only to have
it taken from you and given to those who' have never worked or
saved or contributed anything to society or even to their own
welfare. And, anyway, every year money becomes worth less
and less. For fifteen years I have been paying in hundred-cent
dollars for annuities and life insurance, and already if I chose
to cash in my annuity I would be getting back only sixty cents
for the hundred cents I paid in, and if and when I die my chil-
dren may get back only five cents for every dollar I worked hard
to accumulate for them, and the government will take the better
part of even the five cents. And even if the company went on
paying the commissions to my family on the insurance I have

[ 65 ]

sold, their incomes would shrink and shrink as the cost of every-
thing went up. And all this is done, so they say, for the benefit
of the American citizen, to make life richer for him and more
secure, not in his will and spirit but in plumbing and electric
blankets for everybody.

So working to make and save money for your wife and children
is scarcely worth while. Like as not you will leave them not
security but liability. The best thing you can leave them is an
education, preferably for a trade, in the world that lies ahead
of us the means of making a living with their hands since less
and less do brains and education receive their reward save in
terms of vicious and corrupting power. Or in rewards for having
designed some evil new missile which can tear living men, women
and children apart or burn them alive. You can leave your chil-
dren, perhaps, a sense of values, a taste for music or the out-of-
doors or something which can make life more interesting and
more possible of endurance.

Here in the wet jungle I have had time to think. It is perhaps
the greatest pleasure I have ever known, but at times I become
the victim of some grotesque and terrible thoughts. At moments
it seems to me that mankind has devised all the means of his
own destruction always in the deceptive guise of scientific ad-
vance. But there are other factors the careful preservation of
all idiots and physical weaklings and the lowest elements of the
human stock which breed and increase their numbers far out of
all proportion to those elements which might improve the race
and make the world a better and more civilized place. And there
is the great American illusion that plumbing and water closets
and automobiles are civilization, when a hermit living in a cave
may be a million times more civilized than the country-club
member with three cars in his garage. And there is the great
materialist illusion which has corrupted, like the yaws which
.afflict the dirty jungle natives, both Russians and Americans,
where all value is placed upon machines and radios and plumb-
ing and material security. One hears a great deal about material
living standards and how many hours of labor it takes in one

[66]

country or another to produce a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread,
but never anything about freedom of the spirit or the intellect or
the simple delights of leading a civilized existence or even the
pleasure and satisfaction of eating good food or making some-
thing with one's hands. And there is the plague of statisticians,
the falsest of all men, who measure everything in numbers, or in
dollars, or in inhuman abstractions, lacking the intelligence or
sensitivity or perception to understand that man is neither a
mechanical invention nor an adding machine nor yet an angel.
Most of the "do-gooders" concern their anxious thoughts not with
any plans for the spiritual or the intellectual sides of life or the
things men really live by, such as work and love and creation.
They are concerned only with doing away with the outside privy,
the amount of income, with providing "security/* with keeping
alive the unfit. Their philosophy is a baffled, perverse, unnatural
one, but it makes them feel warm inside and good regardless of
its long-range evil results.

Sometimes it seems to me that Enid is the perfect product of
the age in which we live. She leads an existence which is almost
wholly material and even mechanical, without depth or per-
ception, without questioning anything save those who rebel
against her kind of living. She lives in a world of conformity in
which she herself has no freedom (although the thought never
occurs to her) . She has no right to be an individual or a character
or an eccentric because this is the unforgivable crime. The char-
acter, the eccentric has gone out of American life and it is the
poorer for it. If one questions the routine materialist world, one
is a Red or a Fascist, a crackpot or fit only to be committed. It
is in a way dangerous even to speak a fundamental truth. And
through it all the professional politicians worm their way like
maggots in a cheese, always offering the "peepul" more and
more money which comes not out of the politicians' pockets but
out of the "peepulY' own. The whole of our political economy is
like a monster devouring itself bit by bit, chewing its own tail
until at last both digestion and evacuation become impossible and
it dies of internal putrescence.

[67]

I couldn't think these things out at home in Oakdale. There
was never time. And my neighbors never had time. Their me-
chanical world, full of washing machines and automobiles and
bathrooms and airplanes, never left them time from saving time.
They never had time to ponder the iniquities of their own gov-
ernment and rise with indignation against it as a monster which
swindled and engulfed them. The most they could do was to
shrug their shoulders and say, '"What can you expect of poli-
ticians?" or, again shrugging, <e Why bother to vote? My vote
won't count for anything. It's just one vote against a million."
To vote took time away from their squirrel-cage activities, with-
out sense or meaning. But they never stopped whining over each
rise in taxes.

And all the noble plans to impose democracy and good gov-
ernment and liberty and freedom upon people like these in this
teeming, maggoty East who cannot read or write and actually
have no words in their language for these abstractions whose
meaning has been painfully evolved through centuries of trial
and error, of persecution and martyrdom, of education and en-
lightenment. They have no words for "freedom" or "democracy"
or even "dignity." Small wonder that when they are given free-
dom they become the immediate victims of the first ruthless and
criminal exploiter and dictator . . the victims of their own
animalism. The element of quality seems to have gone out of a
soggy world, except among the advertising hucksters who apply
the word only to what machinery has created.

I do not think I am crazy. Sitting here in this hot moist solitude
it seems to me that all the rest of the world is crazy a thought
which, if I uttered it at home in Oakdale, would certainly bring
about my prompt incarceration in a booby hatch. It is the old
saying, the supposed test of insanity that everyone is crazy
but you and me and you are a little crazy. It seems to me that
if I were shut up as mad, I should only be occupying a mad-
house within a madhouse and that in such a concentrated center
of madness I might find again at least here and there an element
of sense, because through the double madness one might fulfill

[ 68 ]

the circle and achieve at last a return to at least some fragments
of sense.

My Sergeant too thinks that he lives in a crazy world, but he
has not arrived at that conclusion by any intellectual process
but through his senses, since that is how he lives. He merely
says, **Me for myself ... a good meal, some good draft beer,
a passable woman, and to hell with the rest of them. I can
always make a living because I am smart with my hands and
all the rest of them can't live without their washing machines
and automobiles and radios. Turn off the electric current and
they would be a bunch of helpless sonsofbitches." Sometimes
when I think that I may be nuts he reassures me. Quite ob-
viously, by the most basic and fundamental standards, he is
not, yet we react and think in a remarkably similar fashion. His
scorn of the world in which we live is much greater and certainly
more violent than mine.

Sometimes lying awake in the night it seems to me that man
has lost his dignity, that he has been robbed of it by the machines
to which he has become a slave, by the machines which draw
him and his kind together to live in huddled concentrations of
huts removed from all contact with the natural universe of
which, from the day he is torn painfully from his mother's womb
until the day he is laid in the ground with a handful of earth
in his face, he is hopelessly and inevitably a part. He has been
degraded both in body and in spirit for there is denied him more
and more each day the dignity, which belongs even to the
animals, of making their own life, or finding food and shelter,
of living as free creatures to whom death is but an incident.

During centuries man has built, with suffering and martyrdom
and some wisdom, a structure which has begun to disintegrate,
to rot from within so that to diagnose the ills and check them
has become impossible since man himself is so confused by his
mechanical and political achievements that at length all judg-
ment and all standards are lost. He expects machines to do the
honest and beautiful work his hands once did and the state
(which inevitably is himself and fellows) to make his decisions,

[69 ]

to pension him and provide the security which he himself once
provided with dignity and with that satisfaction which is the
blessing of all creators downward from God and which the kept,
the shiftless, the indolent cannot and never will know or under-
stand. He comes to believe that the state is an entity wholly
separate from himself which will arrange his life and feed and
shelter him. But the state is never a thing apart save in the worst
sense, never is it either wise or benevolent, but essentially de-
structive in its impersonality, in its materialism, in its ruthless-
ness, in its corruption, in its stupidity. Calling it democracy does
not alter its power of destroying the spirit, the intelligence, the
creative forces which essentially separate man from the lower
animals.

I am but a single man, a fragile spark of life subject to all
manner of ills, an infinitesimal speck in the universe, of no in-
trinsic or basic importance whatever to the operations of that
universe, as little in respect to all of this universe as the ant
trodden under foot. I am only fighting now to bring myself
understanding and consequently dignity without which man him-
self is of less importance than the squid or the primitive lamprey.

On reading this over it seems to me presumptuous to have
such thoughts. I am a mediocrity, limited and bound, who should
be content with all the wonders and benefits of modern and
mechanical democracy and a "modern" existence. Well, I am not.

V Oakdale

f\ LITTLE TIME BEFORE I WENT TO WAH I RECEIVED A

questionnaire from the University at which I received my degree.
Among the questions was one which read, "What benefits do you
consider you received during the four years you attended the
University?" In a moment of bitterness I wrote, "None," and
returned the questionnaire.

In this I was wrong and unfair for I did receive perhaps some

[70]

benefits. I made some friends who remained friends. I did learn
something about getting on with people and came to have some
understanding regarding good books and I learned a few facts
which remained in my mind. I think, quite honestly, that this
was about all I got out of the four years spent there. The tor-
menting thing is the speculation which returns to me again and
again that I might have learned much more during those four
years by striking out into the world on my own, and that in doing
so I might have lost or destroyed the middle-class complacency
and paralysis which reduced my whole life to the monotonous
level o uninspired work, material rewards, and conformity, out of
which it became slowly apparent that the only escape was neither
physical nor intellectual but through drinking. The whole ex-
perience at college only tended to fertilize and cultivate the
snobberies, the conformity, the shibboleths of the life which had
already begun to limit and stifle me. In a sense the four years
were spent in a vacuum four years in which I was protected
from almost all reality, four years in which I had neither to go
to work nor to face the business of living. I emerged a pitifully
immature specimen, in reality no older, no wiser, no more ex-
perienced than when I entered. In a way the University only
served to arrest my development and preserve my adolescence.

In those four years I might have simply knocked about the
world. I might have gone to India or Sumatra or China. I might
have met all sorts of people fascinating or strange or even evil
but at least real. I might have starved or have fallen ill in a
strange country. I might have learned a language or two. But I
did none of these things. Instead I spent four years at a university
without much work, in the illusion that I was enjoying myself
and during that time did not have to be every morning at nine
o'clock in my father's office. I joined one of the good fraternities
and won my letter in basketball and was on the wrestling team,
and I emerged from college no more mature or experienced than
I entered it.

The next step of course was marriage and then a family, and
by that time it was too late and I was too weak to change a

[71 ]

pattern of which most of my friends were the victims. Today
those wasted four years when I was young and completely free
seem a terrible loss, not only as wasted years but for what I
might have done during them things perhaps which would
have changed my whole life and set me free.

I have tried many times to think why I went to the University.
My future was assured in my father's business. I did not need
the technical education necessary to become an engineer, a
lawyer, or a doctor. I was certainly not a genius or even bril-
liant. I always had good marks which I got without too much
work. After thinking and thinking I can only discover one or
two reasons pressure from my parents who, never having been
to college themselves, placed an exaggerated value, common to
their generation, on what was called a "college education" or
"a college-bred man" (another expression which belongs with
the vulgarity of "gorgeous drapes'' and "occasional chairs").
I also went to college because that was the thing everybody in
my world did, whether they learned anything or not.

I found that I was not alone in this situation. Plenty of the
boys I knew were in college for those reasons and for some
others, equally beside the point. Some of them had been sent
to college because "they might make connections there to whom
they could sell stocks or bonds or insurance" and some because
their fathers wanted them to belong to the same club or fra-
ternity. The idea that a university was a place dedicated to that
precious thing called learning scarcely occurred to most of my
friends. They managed to stay in college and get decent marks
either because they were not too stupid and the standards were
not too high or because in order to play on the team it was
necessary to get passing grades. Among the others were the men
who wanted an education badly enough to work their way
through school or the "grinds" or -those who happened to be
among the elect, possessing brains and charm and good looks
and athletic prowess all combined through some special bless-
ing. These last, of course, were in the vast minority. Most of
us were simply the sons of middle-class well-to-do parents who

[72]

were at once in awe of education and in terror of intelligence or
intellect or genius.

It did seem odd that there were so few who really wanted to
learn or who really emerged at last with any evidence whatever
of having been to a great university. Most of them, on receiving
their degrees, considered their education finished and from that
point believed it unnecessary to learn anything more or to take
any special interest in anything. Most of them have remained
culturally and intellectually at the level marked by their gradua-
tion, as life grew duller and duller and they came more and
more to kill time until they died.

I "made" one of the better fraternities for a variety of reasons.
I was not bad-looking. I had clean expensive clothes. I was pre-
sentable. I showed some prowess in athletics and I had money
to spend. These factors, on the whole, seemed to be the qualifica-
tions for being invited to join any of the better" fraternities.
I drank beer. I "necked" appropriately on the occasion of college
dances. In the last year I had a car of my own. Now and then,
rather in a spirit of bravado, some of us went to the nearest city
and visited a brothel, but most of us were a little scared and
some of us did nothing at all but drink beer after we got there.

The only one who went regularly and for enjoyment and
perhaps relief was a dark, tense, brilliant fellow named Frank
Saunders. Everybody knows his name now for he is the head of
a great corporation and did much to organize industry and
carry on the war. At the time he was not too popular and was
regarded with mingled envy and distaste for his experienced
ways. He was older than the rest of us in his class by three or
four years because his father had sent him off on a leisurely trip
round the world so that, as the father expressed it, "He would
have some sense by the time he went to college." He knew what
he wanted in life and went after it. For this he was regarded as
being eccentric. There were, of course, a few boys known as
"literary" who instinctively drew together through mutual in-
tellectual interests. They represented the one in a hundred and
I scarcely knew any of them. During the first two or three years

[ 73 ]

I would have been ashamed of being friends with any of them.

When I try to remember what happened during those four
years I find it very difficult. The years seem to remain blurred
in a lazy, agreeable haze in which nothing happened of any
importance. That phrase "nothing happened" is a terrifying one
when one considers how brief is life and how great and varied
are its delights and how immense are the fascinations of a still
almost unexplored and unknown universe. It seems to me that
I was driven by nothing, neither by ambition nor sexual appetites
nor curiosity nor indeed anything at all, and in this I was like
most of my fellow classmen. There were no torments, no bitter
disappointments, no ecstasies, no tragedy, no great honors or
great defeats, in fact "no nothing/' I suppose this is what some
men consider happiness when they talk of the happy years
spent in college. It is this, I suppose, which leads them back on
class day to make fools of themselves in a foggy, sometimes
drunken effort to recapture that happy dullness. Few things are
sadder than the class-day reunion with its hordes of middle-aged,
rather baffled and puzzled men attempting to recapture not only
something which has gone forever but should have been gone
and been forgotten as they grew into maturity and achievement,
something which, often enough, never existed at all. This im-
mature institution of the reunion, it seems to me, is a bitter
commentary on the failure both of education and indeed of a
civilization. It is very special to this country.

I went back twice to reunions before I came out to this island,
but the pleasures I found there were very mixed. In the begin-
ning I was glad to see some of my old friends, and then after a
little time I became bored and saddened because the tie between
us was so artificial and so faded and because it quickly became
even more frayed and worn. And so I too began to drink and
in drinking I found the illusion which I had returned to find.
With alcohol in my veins I began to think that the others, like
myself, were very amusing and I fell back into the flow of con-
versation confined entirely to the category of "Do you remember
the time that good old so-and-so climbed the bell tower?" The

[ 74]

ones with whom I might have enjoyed a conversation, the ones
who had gone out into the world and made a civilized life for
themselves, were not there, perhaps because they had grown
into maturity and because their immediate lives were so satis-
factory that there was no need and no time to return and attempt
to recapture the past.

After the second time I never went again to a class reunion,
and it is highly unlikely that I shall ever go to another if and
when this bloody war ever comes to an end.

Education is, I suppose, largely a matter of the individual, both
on the side of the teacher and of the scholar, and both teacher
and scholar are perhaps born and not made. I would say that if
a man does not want an education nothing on earth can force
it down him and, conversely, that if he desires it nothing can
prevent him from achieving it. In between, of course, are all the
people who do not know whether they want to learn or under-
stand anything or not, and that is where the inspired teacher
comes in, the man or woman who can lend excitement to any
subject and surround himself with young people whose whole
lives may be changed by contact with the flame he represents.
These of course are all too rare, for the great majority of those
who teach are not thus blessed but are merely making a living
,t a task which gradually becomes more and more distasteful or
maintaining toward their work an attitude of dullness and detail
which turns any subject into a misery. And of course there is in
the teaching profession itself an element which inevitably leads
toward eventual desiccation and academic God-almightiness
the fact that a teacher sits on a throne and dictates to those with
less academic knowledge and less authority.

In all my experience in college I encountered only one teacher
who possessed the flame and was* capable of transmitting the
spark to those to whom he addressed his efforts. The others cer-
tainly failed to kindle any fire in me and I find great difficulty in
remembering most of them or anything they taught me. They
have simply faded out without leaving an impression. This single
teacher did bring to me something which has remained precious

[75]

to me and will so long as I live and has been a refuge and a con-
solation and a bulwark against the buffetings of existence. He
taught me to read. I mean, really, to read. In Oakdale I doubt
that any of our friends read a book a year. The women sometimes
talked about books but had rarely read them. They got their
information from professional female book reviewers who dressed
elaborately and badly and used extravagant hats for "bait."

It seems to me that most people never arrive at much achieve-
ment or even satisfaction in life because they do not know what
they want or because, if they do from time to time have an
inkling, the objective constantly changes. And of course there
are those who are always looking to get something for nothing
and those who will work harder to keep from working than if
they simply buckled down and did a job. I do not know what it
was I wanted and I do not know today except that I would like
the life which I have missed, a life full of excitement and fun
and recklessness and satisfaction and achievement. (I write all
of this with a kind of agonizing truth and bitterness. It is my own
story, my own failure but, God knows, I am not alone. )

I could leave my family today, throw all responsibility to the
winds, set out as a tramp around the world, run off with another
woman than my wife. Oh! there are a lot of things I could do,
but after forty they seem a little silly and the whole effort would
be a phony. There is nothing at once sillier or more tragic than
the middle-aged man who discovers he has missed the train and
tries to make up for it when it is too late.

Twice . . . only twice did I have a real glimpse of that life
which under other circumstances I might have had if I had
been brought up in a different background, with different parents,
and if I had been a different character with just a spark of some-
thing. It happened the first time on the only visit I made to
Frank Saunders* family.

They lived in summer in a big house in the East. Frank's father
was an architect and a very distinguished one and the house was
a Georgian house, although even as a junior at the University
where I was supposed to be receiving a cultural education I had

[76 ]

not yet learned that there were such things as Georgian houses,
or Renaissance or Jacohean houses, or any other kind of houses.
All I knew was that there was a type called Colonial and one
called "English Rustic" and of course "Early American" which is
scarcely architecture at all The Saunders' house was, I recognized
even by my uninformed standards, a very beautiful house. I
knew it because when I stood near the entrance to the grounds
the sight of the house with its great windows and pink brick,
partly covered with ivy, and the horseshoe-shaped stairs leading
to the main entrance all made me feel good, much as some music
makes me feel.

The hall inside made you feel the same way, with its high ceil-
ing and the great door at the far end and the curving stairway
which mounted to the rooms above. At one side there was a big
table which always carried a tray on which stood drinks of all
kinds so that anyone coming in from tennis or a long walk or a
ride could have a drink at any hour of the day or night. Near it
there was a wooden chest in which, standing upright, was a col-
lection of walking sticks and umbrellas to be used by the family
or guests for walks in every kind of weather.

At the right was the dining room which I remember as one of
the most beautiful rooms I have ever seen, dark with paneled
woodwork but gay and bright with the light which came in
through the big square-paned windows. It glowed with silver and
porcelain and crystal and there were always flowers, not just tight
little bouquets but huge exuberant bunches of flowers of many
kinds and colors. They were not simply stuck into vases. They
were not arid garden-club "arrangements'' compounded self-con-
sciously out of aspidistras and old beer cans. Always they were
what might be called "creations" in which a variety of colors and
forms were woven together in a kind of exuberant architectural
pattern. They gave me the same satisfaction that I found in look-
ing at the faade of the house. They were "right" for the house
and for that particular room and I had not seen many things that
were "right" ever before in my life. Frank's mother always did
the flowers herself every two days. It was the first time I ever

[77]

realized that flowers could be more than a mere bunch of
carnations and roses or that they could become architecture or
painting or music.

On the opposite side of the hall there was a big room called
sometimes the living room and sometimes the drawing room. It
had big doors which stood open day and night during the sum-
mer overlooking the garden where the flowers were not in "beds"
but existed in a kind of ordered riot of design and color. There
was a big table covered with books and magazines, many of them
French or English or German. There were ashtrays everywhere
for smoking and, mixed with the English furniture, a great many
comfortable sofas and chairs upholstered in bright chintz. There
were none of the mud colors so favored in Oakdale. The colors
were clear and gay and positive without timidity or conformity.

The floor was covered by a huge Chinese rug spotted here and
there where drinks had been spilled or puppies had let them-
selves go. One evening Frank's mother indelicately remarked that
she favored rugs with intricate designs on them since the puppy
spots showed less and eventually seemed to become part of the
design. I never saw the room in what might have been called a
"state of order" let alone the inhuman meticulous order of my
mother's house or Enid's. The drawing room too was always
filled with flowers. The odd thing was that the English furniture
and the great rug had a value many times that of the constantly
polished, perpetually dusted stuff in my mother's house or the
things which Enid later bought for our "lovely home'* with
"gorgeous drapes" in Oakdale.

I remember at first a feeling of shock at the disorder and a
suspicion that Frank's mother was not a very good housekeeper,
for my mother never allowed dogs in the house and she kept in
the living room a set of minute ashtrays arranged in a rack just
in case any not too welcome sprawling smoking guest entered
the place. The ashtrays at Frank's house were huge affairs of
heavy glass, and usually by the end of the evening they were
pretty well filled unless someone emptied them into the fireplace
behind a paper screen made in the shape of a fan simply to hide
the rubbish until it was burned the following morning.

[78 ]

Frank's mother was a warm handsome woman who must have
been very beautiful as a girL She was big and rather plump and
appeared nearly always during the day in a rough tweed skirt
and plain blouse with a small ruffle down the front. In the eve-
ning she dressed almost as simply as in the daytime and wore as
adornment rather heavy gold jewelry. There was nothing fussy
or "dainty** about her. You got the impression that she was so
busy living that she did not have time for fussiness. Yet somehow
the handsome simple costumes were a symbol of her character,
her serenity, her taste. They defined and indicated a person of
quality.

She was at the door waiting for us when we arrived, and after
an introduction and a warm greeting she enveloped Frank in a
great hug and kissed him on both cheeks. It was the first time I
had ever seen such an embrace. My mother always kissed me full
on the mouth almost with the violence of a mistress, and I have
never been able to persuade Enid that I hate the taste of lipstick
and the smell of cold cream, probably because both have become
associated with Enid and because I have never had the courage
to say to her that I could not bear going through the farce of
kissing her on the mouth when there was no longer any passion
involved. But this mouth-kissing business with its simulation of
passion is all part of Enid's show and play-acting. If in public
she were ever seen kissing me in any other fashion, the other
women in her world would begin at once to say that things wer
not going well between us. I suspect that she likes the smell of
tobacco and shaving lotion no better than I like the taste of lip-
stick and cold cream. But she has to put on a show.

Frank's mother took me up to the room I was to share with him
because she said the house was full of people. The younger chil-
dren had even been moved out to sleep on cots in the play house
by the tennis court. She was delighted to have me if I didn't
mind not having a room of my own. It was a big house, although
it probably had no more rooms than the ornate house in Crescent
City in which I was still living, and it struck me that if the house
was filled there must be a lot of people there. And there were. . . .

[79 ]

At home we rarely had an overnight visitor, and my mother
frowned upon my having a friend to stay overnight when I was
small. The only visitors I can remember were relatives who stayed
with us over the funeral of my grandfather and an occasional big-
busted, aggressive female who was a fellow member of one of
my mother's many organizations and whose visit seemed more
like that of a general or an institution than a visitation from a
human being.

Even now, years later, as I sit here in the jungle the memory of
that visit is a glowing thing. In the beginning I was perplexed
by it, by the people I met there, by their vitality and grace and
by something I only came to understand much later their
capacity for living. None of the people in that house ever seemed
to have enough time, not because they were rushing about in
planes and automobiles or from bar to country club to convention,
simply killing time until they died, but because there was so
much to do, so much to see and hear, so much to learn and
understand. In that house I heard conversation for the first time,
and by that I mean conversation for the sake of conversation, for
the delight in the exchange of ideas, for the give and take of
good argument which sometimes waxed furious and angry
because the individuals believed passionately in the idea or the
theory they were expounding or defending. I had my first in-
sight into the thing called principle as opposed to the thing called
prejudice. Most of the arguments I had heard until that time
might have been encompassed by the words "bickering" or they
were flat statements of inflexible uncompromising intolerance.

Thinking of it now, it seems to me that in the world I had
known until then the violent opinions and principles of the early
pioneer had simply degenerated into statements of prejudice and
intolerance based upon nothing much but ignorance and petu-
lance and conformity, and in that same world opinions and ideas
rarely rose to the level of intellectual discussion. So conversation
as such became a revelation to me as something stimulating and
even exciting, which left me, when I was again in bed with, the
lights out, excited and sleepless and confused, and although I was,

[80]

perplexed I was aware that I was having a glowing experience in
which I myself was an outsider, and this knowledge created
within me two things, a gentle melancholy and a sense of envy
for Frank who had been so lucky as to have grown up in such a
world.

And I began to understand why Frank, at college and in the
fraternity house, was not popular and was taciturn and some-
times sullen, why he worked hard and made a brilliant record
and seemed to find, without ever saying so, the activities of the
rest of us a little Juvenile and boring. He did not talk much
because there was no talk about anything except beer drinking
and football and jokes that were pretty bad. The fraternity had
made a mistake about him. They had been fooled by his good
looks, his air of worldliness, the certain dark intensity which he
had, and the attractive violence of his personality. I think most of
our fellow members would gladly have been rid of him. For his
mere presence in the same room with them induced an almost
universal and annoying sense of clumsiness and inferiority. He
had- quality, a characteristic rare in these times and steadily be-
coming more so. It was something intangible but inexpressibly
irritating. The only thing he brought to the fraternity was the
brilliant scholastic record and a real mind, which to the other
boys was of little importance as compared with the record of any
quarterback who barely managed to stay in school on "scholar-
ship" through the unmoral connivance of the University
authorities.

I did not know why he asked me to visit his family and I do
not know until this day. We were not especially good friends,
and my only guess is that he found me more tolerable and per-
haps possessed of a little more potential intelligence than the
others and that he perhaps detected in me a spark which has
never grown into a flame but only weakened and threatened, at
last, to destroy me a spark that was a kind of yearning for
something better than I had known up till then, something which
I could not define, much less understand. I only knew that it
must exist and even then that in my life it was missing.

[ 81]

As I have grown older and more experienced it has occurred to
me that there existed between Frank and myself a land of
physical attraction which perhaps, with his greater experience,
he recognized more clearly than I was able to do. It was, of
course, something which neither of us could or would recognize
and something which most people never quite understand or
realize the attraction of two pleasant, good-looking people of
the same sex for each other and the pleasure they find merely
being in each other's company. It explains certainly the attraction
possessed by certain individuals for others who share few of their
qualities or tastes but find pleasure merely in their physical pres-
ence. The physical attraction comes first accompanied by the
desire that on the spiritual and intellectual side, in the matter of
common tastes, there may be a sympathy as great as the original
attraction. There is nothing in the least wicked or perverse about
such an attraction, although it sometimes leads to the bewilder-
ment and confusion which colored the whole of my brief, fairly
intense friendship with Frank. I think he found in me during our
college days the illusion of common interests and a sympathy
which scarcely existed in reality and that it probably was some
faint physical attraction which led him into that illusion. I know
now that on my side I was actually dazzled by the combination of
his dark good looks, his vitality, his precocious wisdom, and his
brilliance. And, of course, my vanity was flattered by the fact that,
although he scarcely had any real communication with the other
members of the fraternity, he had chosen to invite me to his own
home. Even today I am flattered by the thought that in me he at
least found possibilities that were not at all apparent in the
others.

My mother was anxious to have me make the visit. She knew
the celebrated name of Frank's father and I fancy that she be-
lieved I might achieve some material gain through contact with
the world he represented. I might even make "contacts" among
the Eastern millionaires to whom I could sell whopping life-
insurance policies.

It was not only that I was confused by the fast-moving and

[82 ]

exciting conversation but I was confused by other things. I re-
member that on the first night I was dressed for dinner before
Frank, and he said, "Go along downstairs to the living room and
get yourself a drink. I'll be down in a couple of minutes/*

So I went down the big stairway to the sound of wonderful
music which came from the living room and which I recognized
at once as beautiful just as, instinctively, I had recognized that
the house and flowers were beautiful and organized and were
possessed of a design, a balance, and a purpose something which
had received neither respect nor understanding in the world
from which I came.

Someone was playing the piano, wildly and exuberantly, im-
provising a flamboyant waltz in the Viennese manner. It was a
kind of apotheosis of the waltz which seemed to lift you out of
reality and into a world which never existed on land or sea, in
which everything was all right and gay and beautiful and there
was no dullness nor any misery. I have not heard much music
beyond the recordings I have collected through the years and for
which Enid has no taste, but I think I never heard any music so
brilliant, so effortless, so good feeling. My own feet grew lighter.
As I descended the stairs it was as if I had no weight at all.
Quite literally my heart sang, and I divined, in a sudden flash of
emotion and excitement, something which was good and even
wonderful that I had never experienced and which lay somehow
just beyond my reach. I felt for a second or two as if I be-
longed," as if I had escaped. I did not know what it was to which
I belonged nor very clearly what it was from which I had
escaped, at least momentarily. I wanted suddenly and shamelessly
to weep out of sheer happiness.

I did not go into the living room at once but stopped by the
table in the hall where the drinks were kept and poured myself a
cocktail from a silver pitcher which sat in a pail of cracked .ice.
It tasted clean and cold and lovely. I wanted to stay there for-
ever just as I was in the beautiful hallway, listening to the
incredible music which seemed to me like very beautiful fire-
works against a brilliant blue night sky.

[83 ]

And I thought, "What a wonderful house! In it there seems to
be no troubles, but only fun. Everything is pleasant. Everything is
beautiful. Everything seems to fit. Nobody is pretending to be
anything. Nobody is gossiping or quarreling or getting drunk."

Above the music I heard the sound of laughter and voices and
I experienced a faint sense of shock because there was not a com-
plete silence in the presence of such music. I thought, "Surely this
must be a great musician and they should be listening with
respect."

Then Frank appeared running down the stairs with the peculiar
grace and muscular control which was a large part of his attrac-
tion. He stopped at sight of me and laughed, saying, "What* s the
matter? Scared?" and I said, "No, I was just listening."

"It's Scherbatov," he said. "He's showing off for free. There's
nobody like him when he gets going."

He poured himself a cocktail and said, "Come on," and put
his arm through mine and led me into the living room. I think
he understood how much I felt an outsider, like a beggar at the
door.

In the big room there were a lot of people, some of whom I
never got quite straight during the whole visit and do not even
remember very well. They all seemed alike in one thing that
they were gay and that somehow they all seemed to be extremely
friendly. Two of them, a dark man and a blonde woman, sat a
little apart, listening to the fireworks from the piano. A third
turned out to be Frank's father, a big man with a rather florid
face and a rich pleasant voice who welcomed me by putting his
great arms about my shoulders in a warming gesture, as if by
instinct he were trying to gather me into the curious gay atmos-
phere of the room. And there was a very odd scrawny-looking
woman dressed in rather a grim fashion tailed Lady Fitzsimmons
whom you could not possibly forget even after years because of
her sharp and entertaining tongue. She looked very ill but it did
not seem to affect her spirits. There was, too, a very beautiful
dark woman of about thirty with an Italian name which I do not
remember any longer except that they called her Paula. She need

[ 84]

never have spoken at all, for simply to look at her was enough
satisfaction for anyone. I found her beauty almost terrifying and
I could find nothing whatever to say to her on the single occasion
when I discovered myself for a moment in a corner with her.

And there were other people whom I remember less vividly
after so long a time, but they all seemed to be possessed of the
same brilliance and good nature. It struck me that these people
really enjoyed living. They did not pick at it or turn their backs
upon it. Doubtless they had personal tragedies and disappoint-
ments and they could not have been consistently as gay and as
carefree as they seemed to be in this peculiar new world.

The man at the piano went on playing. He appeared simply to
be enjoying himself, pausing now and then for a second to take
a swift drink from the glass that stood beside him on the piano.
He was by all standards an extraordinarily ugly man with a great
prominent nose and a bald head with a fringe of curly hair and
rather popping eyes, but he seemed enveloped in a flame of
vitality and good humor so that even with all the other remark-
able people in the room you kept turning to watch him. Twice the
beautiful dark woman called Paula went over to the piano and
said something to him at which he nodded his head, and even
to an inexperienced novice like myself it was very clear that she
was passionately in love with him.

> Among them all moved FranFs mother and a whole troop of
dogs, a big boxer, a poodle, and two Aberdeens. It seems to me
now that there were more dogs, but those four I remember very
well. They were all trained beggars, and no one in the room
seemed to have any scruples about feeding them bits of the thin
excellent sandwiches which were served with the cocktails, a
procedure which seemed to me unbelievable. My own mother
only allowed me to have a dog after years of begging and then
never permitted it in the house except to sleep in the cellar on
cold nights since it might ruin some of her expensive, ugly
furniture or the hideous fake "Oriental" rugs.

Just before we went in to dinner two of Frank's younger sis-
ters, about fifteen or sixteen years old, came in and said, "How

[85]

cfyou do?" to all the people in the room, explaining that they
were going off to a neighbor's for dinner. The ugly pianist
stopped playing and swung about and kissed them both warmly
on the cheek as they left. They were pretty girls, and I remember
thinking that if I married one of them I might by that very act
find my way into this magic circle. The odd thing was that the
two girls, despite the fact that they were at the awkward age, did
not seem shy or resentful or strange as you might have expected.
I understood this only later when I came to notice that in this
house there was no such thing as age. The young were not sepa-
rated from the old, and one discovered a great interest and
animation and friendliness and mutual respect among them all.
At the dinner party there were people of every possible age. To
me, accustomed to a society in which people were stratified
according to age and the young regarded the old as fossils and
the old regarded the young as "squirts/* all this was startling.

The food at dinner was wonderful. It was not simply food.
Everything had its own taste instead of all tasting alike from
soup to pudding. I drew a place between the dark beauty and a
Mrs. Somebody or other who was a neighbor. It turned out that
she was divorced and had a thriving business of her own in New
York which had to do with furniture and glassware. I was a fail-
ure, I am afraid, merely answering the questions of the beauty
about the part of America in which I was living and which she
was about to visit for the first time. The smart, businesslike
divorcee had a cousin who had once lived in Crescent City, and
the contact helped a little with the conversation. The cousin's
name was Mary Raeburn, whom I knew but slightly although
much later she was to make a great upheaval in my life. I envied
Frank who seemed to be having no trouble at all between Lady
Fitzsimmons and a pretty blonde woman of perhaps thirty. I
could see now, more than ever, why at school he had been
taciturn. Certainly he talked enough now to make up for months
of silence. At school he had found nothing to talk about and no
one with whom it was possible to hold a conversation.

After dinner some of them played bridge in a small room off

I 86]

the drawing room and the others talked, and presently Scherbatov
went to the piano and played some serious music, and then he
and Frank's mother and another of the older men did a wonder-
fully funny burlesque of an opera which I discovered was Tristan
und Isolde. Scherbatov improvised fake music with a Wagnerian
sound and an occasional Wagnerian theme. Frank's mother, En-
veloped in a mass of draperies, played Isolde, and the older man,
with an aluminum saucepan on his head, a long cape, and an old
saber did Tristan, returning from far into the kitchen and singing
as he came closer and closer until he joined Isolde on a settee
where they sat at arm's length, embracing each other as they sang
a boisterous version of the second-act love duet. And after that
Frank's mother, leaning against the piano, gave an imitation of
an arty and bad concert singer. I remember that one of the florid
pieces she sang was called, "D'un Prison," and the other,
""I/Esclave." In the midst of it the big poodle suddenly sat up-
Tight under the piano, opened his mouth, and joined in the con-
cert with a series of wonderful and mournful howls.

"Long after midnight we all had more good sandwiches. Some
lad milk and some had drinks and at last the party broke up.
Half the people were staying in the house and the others went off
into the night to other houses near by.

Upstairs, after I had got into my pajamas, I sat on the edge
of the bed still dazzled, still thinking, still bewildered, and when
Frank came out of the bathroom he looked at me, grinned, and
said, "What's the matter? Depressed?"

"No, I had a wonderful time. I never saw people like that
"before."

"I guess there aren*t many of them around. Did you get them
.straightened out?"

"Some of them, I guess. The Italian woman is the most beauti-
ful woman I ever saw."

"Yes. She's famous for that. Quite a girL She's Scherbatov's
-mistress." He noticed the bewilderment in my face. "Yes. That's
Tight. Don't discount Scherbatov because he's ugly. He's a famous
lady-killer. Women run after him every place he goes."

[87]

Then I stepped into the trap which I suspect he had been
setting for me in his sardonic way. I asked, "Does your mother
know about it?"

He laughed. "Of course. She's put them in adjoining bedrooms
so they won't have to wander about trying to find each other."

I felt the color coming into my face, and Frank seemed
suddenly sorry for having exploited my provinciality. "You
see/' he said, "she thinks things like that are none of her busi-
ness . . . that is, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. If
people are nasty or mean it is quite a different matter. You
should see her then. Nobody can trample and squelch people like
Ma if she wants to, when she finds somebody has been cruel or
cheap. She thinks what people do in their private lives is none
of her business. Everybody knows about Scherbatov and Paula.
Her husband is a Roman Catholic and won't divorce her."

In the darkness I found it all very puzzling, and what puzzled
me most was the figure of Frank's mother who seemed so warm
and healthy and pleasant and quite obviously a happy and faith-
ful wife and a very good mother. In my world where everything
was black or white she would have been considered wicked
for having such a couple as Scherbatov and Paula in the house.
If sin were such a terrifying and evil thing how could these
people be so happy and, above all, so gay? How could she
permit her young daughters to speak to a woman like Paula who
was living in sin, nay, even in open adultery.

There is no use in going further into the rest of the week.
People came and went. It seemed that the big beautiful house
was always filled with dogs and people and children, all of
whom seemed to get on admirably together regardless of age.
A good part of the time they talked about things of which I
had little or no knowledge so that, even if I had been less shy
and awkward in such a society, I still could not have taken part
in any conversation worth listening to.

On Sunday evening when the servants were out Frank's-
mother turned in and cooked the dinner, and an excellent dinner
it was, and the angular, sharp old Lady Fitzsimmons turned

[88]

herself into a kitchen maid and a good one, preparing the vege-
tables and washing up the saucepans. Scherbatov and Paula on
Thursday night made a wonderful dish of Spaghetti Bolognese,
and Frank's father took over the salad. After both meals Frank
and I and his two sisters washed up the dishes and cleaned the
kitchen, Mary, the prettier of the girls, mopping up the floor
with the expertness of a charwoman. Even the dogs took part in
the affair, lying around underfoot and being fed morsels from
time to time. It was all over and we were back in the living
room an hour from the time we left the table. ... I was useful
then, and I think I enjoyed those two evenings the most of the
whole visit. I could listen and participate without seeming an oaf.

But the thing which impressed me most was that these people
enjoyed what they were doing that old Lady Fitzsimmons
took pride in her job as kitchen maid and probably did a better
job than any of the servants. Scherbatov and Paula put their
whole souls into the spaghetti along with the meat and tomato
sauce, and Mary, Frank's sister, scrubbed the floor probably
more thoroughly and efficiently than it had been scrubbed in
years.

When the conversation turned upon servants, Frank's mother
said, *Tve never had any servant trouble. We all get along well
and I have had the same couple for eighteen years. My father
gave me wise advice when I was a girL He said, TLearn to do
everything. You can never know too much in this Hfe/ and so I
did learn, and if a laundress walked out on me or a cook became
insolent, I could always say, TLeave if you want to, but if you stay
try to be good-tempered* There's one thing I won't have around
the house even in my own family and that's a sullen sulky person/
I could always say, Tf you leave I am not helpless. I can ,do
your job probably better than you can do it.' I've never been
sorry in following my father's advice."

It is something I have never forgotten, particularly the part
about 'learn to do everything. You can never know too much in
life.* I have not always followed that admonition. I wish I had.

During the week I developed an intimacy with Frank himself

[89]

which had not existed before. This was so perhaps because we
were sharing a room and perhaps because for a little time Frank
almost felt sorry for me and tried in his abrupt direct way to
help me, even at the end when he must have seen that I was
bewildered and hopelessly out of my depth.

Once I said to him, **Your father must be very rich," and he
laughed. "You'd be surprised how broke he always is. He spends
his money on pictures and furniture and on his big family and on
his friends. He likes to eat and drink well and he's the kind that
always grabs the check. I hate to think how much the old man
is in debt. He makes big fees, sometimes enormous ones, but it
all goes out of the window. None of us kids will inherit a cent.
He keeps telling us that. He says, Tm spending it all on you so
that you'll know how to make your own living and, what's more
important, how to get the most out of life. If you have capital in
a bank, the bank can go bust or your stocks and bonds can go
up the flue. If you have it in your head it's indestructible/"
Frank laughed again. "I know I'll have to make my own living.
The old man keeps telling me so over and over again, and I'm
not interested in Just making a living. I really want to do some-
thing and be somebody,'*

That night he seemed to have been released somehow and
talked more than I had ever heard him talk. Some of the talk
was directed at me and more of it I think was directed at him-
self, as if he were trying to straighten things out.

He said, "I know some of the Choristers in the club disapprove
of me, especially my going over to Jessie's place now and then,
but I know what I'm doing. I know what I want to do. My
father sent me out to the Middle West to college because he
didn't want me to be provincial and know nothing but fellows
from the East or fellows who had nothing but money. He sent
me around the world first, telling me to take my time and find
out what things are about and then maybe when I went to
college I'd have some sense and know the answers and know
what I wanted to do. Well, that's exactly what happened. I do
know what I want to do. I want to be an engineer and, by God,

[90]

I'm going to be a good one. I'm a sexy guy, and when I go over
to Jessie's if s to get it out of the way so I can do my work.
It's a lot better than seducing the daughter of some campus
boarding-house keeper or smooching around in the bushes with
some 'nice girF and getting nothing for it but a lot more agita-
tion. I haven't yet got enough sense to get married and stay
married, and I'm not fool enough to get myself handicapped at
my age with a lot of kids and diapers. Maybe some day 111 fall
in love and that'll be fine, but I hope by that time 111 have
enough sense to make it last and enough money so that I'm not
going to settle down for good in a six-room house in the suburbs
with no prospect of escape. Jeez, if we don't have enough sense
to manage our own lives then we shouldn't whine afterward."

And then remembering all the scare stories and the colored
slides concerning social diseases we had all been treated to again
and again, I asked naively, "Aren't you afraid of catching some-
thing?"

At that he laughed. "I can take care of myself. ... If they'd
teach kids more about that and less about the horror side, every-
body would be better off."

And then he told me that he didn't see the regular girls at
Jessie's place. He told me what I had never known before. He
said, "J ess * e has a list of girls on call. They wouldn't stay in her
house and most of them won't even come there. They'll meet you
at Jessie's home on the edge of town. Some of them are pretty
nice women young widows or wives whose husbands are im-
potent. I've had one girl for the last two years. Her husband
has an electrical repair shop and she's fond of him and doesn't
want to leave him. We meet mostly on Thursday nights when he
goes to the lodge. She's a good girl and not stupid at all. She
doesn't want to leave her husband and I don't want to get mar-
ried, so everything is jake. I'm very fond of her."

I left at the end of the week and I saw Frank again the follow-
ing year at college, but the old brief intimacy seemed to have
vanished and he appeared no longer to have any interest in me.
He was polite and even friendly, but he never mentioned the

[91 ]

visit and he was so set upon what he wanted and what he was
doing that he had very little time for me. I still do not know why
he asked me in the first place to visit his family. I can only
speculate. If he saw anything in me, any possibilities over the
other men in the fraternity, he must have become disillusioned
when he discovered how awkward and ignorant I was in such a
world. He knew as I knew that I did not belong, and he probably
felt that I never could belong or that, if I could, it would take
too much of his time and energy to accomplish the trick. You
must remember that he was nearly four years older than I and
in maturity and background and sense of values hundreds of
years older. Out of the background of that wonderful house,
he had, as a boy, simply absorbed more than I would ever learn
or assimilate in a lifetime, or could ever learn in any college or
university, and after him the young sisters were repeating the
process. How lucky they were!

The visit might have been a cruel thing for me at the time,
and later on, after I married Enid and had two children and
realized that there was no way out, it did turn into a cruel
thing because by the time I was trapped, by myself as well as by
Enid, I began to realize what had happened. If I had never had
that sudden brilliant glimpse of another, richer, more exciting
world, I might never have known, like most of my friends in
Oakdale, that I had missed anything at all, and been moderately
content. But I had seen beneath the curtain, and when I began
to be bored and started to drink like all the others in order to
find even the shabbiest kind of satisfaction in life, it was too late.

It is strange that I remember so vividly the whole of the
visit. As I grow older it seems to become clearer to me and I
remember things and even speeches and remarks which I had for-
gotten during the intervening time. Clearest of all in the
memories is Frank's mother with her warmth and good looks and
health and infectious gaiety. How wonderful it would be to have
a wife like that! Or a mother! I doubt that I could ever have
found a woman like her in my world, and, after all, one has to
deserve such a woman, to offer something even to attract her.

[ 92 ]

What I saw during that visit to Frank's family was a civilized
world in which there was a set of sound values and things fell
into place according to those values. It is something that does
not happen overnight Many things go into its accomplishment
background and spirit and taste and brains and, above all,
values themselves. It was a world in which two cars in the
garage was of no interest whatever except as a convenience. A
car, whether a jalopy or a Rolls, was simply something to get
you from one place to another. It never became a chromium-
plated symbol.

I know now that the people in that world looked upon cars
and plumbing and telephones and all the materialist, mechanical
paraphernalia of our age simply as the means of providing them
with more time to devote to those things which are civilisation
and bring deep satisfaction and richness to living. Without all
the mechanical, material things, I know now that these people
would have been much the same* They would have lived well
and richly in a shack or a cave, and out of all the world they
would have found each other so that when the time came for
them to die they would do so pleasantly and without reluctance
or bitterness or fear or regret, because they had very largely
fulfilled the destiny set for intelligent and civilized mankind. The
cars, the telephones, the radio, tie plumbing were not the goal
nor the measure by which one's material position was determined
as richer and more successful than that of other men; they were
merely the means of achieving something far beyond that. The
odd thing was that these people were not only much happier
than most people that I have known; they were also richer in
worldly goods and success and fame. It was as if a sorry world
sought them out and forced these rewards upon them as a just
compensation for the light they shed, whether it was the music of
Scherbatov or the architecture of Frank's father or the beauty
of Paula or the gaiety and wit of Frank's mother or the bitter
brilliance of old Lady Fitzsimmons. The world, it seems, is hun-
gry for such things and will pay well without ever being billed
for the account. It is people like these who provide the real es-

[93]

cape. They are the fortunate and the blessed because they are not
afraid. Perhaps ? being the blessed, there is no need for them to
know either fear or despairing boredom.

VI The Jungle

SERGEANT BUBKE CAME EST LATE TONIGHT WHILE i WAS BEAD-
ing, not to play rummy this time, but to consult me about some-
thing serious which has occurred. It appears that when he in-
spected the contents of one of the Quonset huts he found that a
considerable quantity of canned goods was missing several tin's
of corned beef and a lot of canned vegetables and fruit.

He was deeply upset and took the whole business as a personal
insult. I think he felt the same indignation which is experienced
by the owner of a burglarized house who is furious less over
the loss of material belongings than over the indignation of hav-
ing his privacy invaded by a stranger. The situation also re-
flected upon his dignity as a sergeant, something which he re-
garded with as much seriousness as a devout monk regards his
vows. This should not have happened to him, and he meant to
ferret out the mystery and bring the culprit to justice if it was
his last act on earth.

He sat down opposite me with little drops of warm crystal
rain still clinging to the big, indignant red face.

"I can't figger it out," he said. "I talked to all the boys and
they are as much in the dark as myself. At first I thought it
might be Homer stealing the stuff to give to his fuzzy-wuz2y
girl friends. He must have to pay something for the tail he's
getting and money doesn't mean anything to those greasy babes.
Homer denied it up and down. I know that he can't tell the truth
if it killed him but this time I kind of believed him. Even when
I threatened to give him a super going-over he still stuck to his
story. When I asked what he did pay for what he was getting, he
just grinned like an ape and said, 1 don't pay nothin'. They pay

[94]

me!' Maybe that's true too. You can't tell about these skinny
pink-haired bastards."

He always took a long time going into a story, bringing in all
sorts of side issues. I'd been interrupted in the middle of writing
and I tried to hurry him along in order to go back to what I was
doing. Here in the jungle there are few interruptions but when
one does occur, especially when I want to be alone to think and
write, it seems monstrous and interminable. I said, "Did you
inspect everything?"

He wiped the perspiration from his face. It had been dripping
down into the black mass of hair that sprouted above the line of
his T shirt. He was a stickler for being neat and clean and such
things disturbed him.

He said, "I was Just comin* to that. After I questioned the
boys I made an inspection for myself and discovered that some
of the corrugated sheets at the end of the hut were loose and
came off in your hand. They were held in place by a couple of
short nails which came out easy. It looked all right until you
touched it and then it came right off. It must be somebody
from outside because if it was Homer or one of the other boys
they could steal all they wanted while they were on guard with-
out ever having to break in."

I looked at him. "Who d you think it is?"

As I told you the Sergeant is a great reader of mystery stories,
having discovered them since he has been shut away here in the
wet, crawling exile and boredom of the jungle. Like many un-
complex and simple creatures he is likely to take on the color of
what he reads or sees in the movies and at times becomes a ham
actor. He was in such a mood now, and despite the uncomfort-
able conditions and his own undoubted bewilderment and
anxiety over the theft of the canned goods, he had begun to give
a performance with only myself for his audience. He mopped his
forehead again and leaned forward toward me. He glanced right
and left as if to make certain that we should not be overheard
and, in almost a whisper, said, "I think some of them yellow
bastards must be hidin* out around here/'

[95]

Although I was tempted to laugh at the pomposity of his be-
havior, I knew that I dared not for fear of hurting his dignity,
and with the Sergeant dignity was the very foundation, the well-
spring of all that he was and hoped to be the dignity of the
Army and of the rank of sergeant.

So I said, seriously, "But there are no Japs around here. There
never have been. The nearest they've ever been is on the next
island. To get here they'd have to swim a forty-mile channel and
then make their way another hundred miles through the jungle."

"I wouldn't put anything past the bastards," he said.

"Did you nail tight the sheeting again?" I asked.

"Yes. They'll have a hell of a time getting it loose without
making such a racket you could hear it."

"Well, watch it and tell the boys to watch it. Probably it's one
of the local apes that's been stealing." Then I added, "And you
might check on the boys and make sure they're not sleeping
on duty."

"Okay."

"How about a drink?" I asked. Here on this lonely island
with only five of us there wasn't any of the nonsense about
officers and enlisted men drinking together.

"Sure."

I poured a slug of whisky for each of us. He took his straight
with a chaser of warm beer and I drank mine with some of the
lukewarm water we had always boiled carefully in advance.
Then the Sergeant returned to his favorite anxiety. For a simple
man he had many of them but this was the one that troubled
him most.

He said, "Captain, you don't think they've just forgotten us here
on this goddamn island? You don't think they're going to leave
us here forever?"

I smiled. "No, they know we're here. They send our pay. They
ask for reports."

*1 don't trust 'em." He crossed one heavy thigh over the other.
"I'm in the Army, see?" he said. "And I've got respect for the
Army. IVe made it my career, as you might say. But I don't

[96]

trust 'em." I poured liim another whisky and his tongue grew a
little looser. "Christ!" he said. Td hate to see any business run
tie way they run the Army. I'm only a sergeant but IVe been at
it a long time and IVe seen things. IVe seen 'em smash up
expensive machinery or leave it just to rust away. IVe seen 'em
dump good stuff like underwear and uniforms just because it was
in the way or it took a little trouble to repack the tracks. I've
seen them dump tons of food into the sea with people all around
them starvin'. I guess the trouble is that in peacetime no really
smart guy would go into the Army. I guess there must be
something a little wrong about any guy who wanted a career in
the Army . . . even some of them guys who went to West Point.
I went into it because I didn't have to worry. I got fed and
clothed and taken care of and because I kinda liked fighting . . .
and now look what they done to me . . . shoved me off here in
this sonofabitch place." He shook his big bullet head. "I've done a
lotta thinkin' since I got stuck off here . . . more'n I ever did in
my Me . . . and I've about decided there must be something
wrong with a guy who wants to get into the Army. You know,
he wouldn't be like other guys. He'd have to be just a little
screwy. I guess that's why in peacetime an Army private is about
the lowest thing you can find so far as most people are con-
cerned. It's even that way with officers too. I've noticed it out-
side the posts. When they're on the post each one of 'em is a
little king. But outside it's different. Why, even a general ain't
as good as an admiral socially speaking. I guess the Navy's
got something we ain't got. I guess that's why most of 'em like
war. It makes them important and nobody cares how much they
spend and they don't have to account to nobody. It's all for the
good of the emergency and can't be helped." He paused for a
moment thoughtfully and added, "I suppose what you call 'the
armed forces' could ruin any country if they go on the way
they're goin'. Some of 'em are goddamn ignorant too ... as
ignorant as I am." He chuckled. "Maybe more so. They've just
had a kind of narrow education but I've been around plenty.
Some of 'em don't even know what people are like."

[97]

I'm putting all this down because I was astonished at so much
wisdom coming out of somebody like the Sergeant. Sometimes
the most simple people are the greatest fountains of wisdom
because their view of life is perfectly direct and uncomplicated
by such things as "issues" and "the good of the country** and
"the good of the service" and "humanitarianism" and "the Com-
mon Man" and all the crap which muddies up the water of clear
thinking and honesty and covers up deceits and hypocrisies and
inefficiency and a thousand things all those expressions and
words and abstractions which rarely have anything to do with
the case but only confuse the issue and prevent progress while
they make the people who use them feel warm all over as if
somehow they were superior and more Christlike than other
people. Sometimes I think that must be the real definition of
a "liberal." Simple people don't get muddled up. They don't
always see things, but when they do see them they see them
plain and in terms of the truth and the fundamentals. Maybe
thafs why Jefferson and Lincoln liked the plain, simple people
liked and admired them.

I said, "I certainly think it would be tough on the country
back home and on all the whole world if things got into the
hands of the generals and admirals once the war is over."

He grinned. "Sometimes," he said, "I think what they'd like
best is a kind of mix-up of war and peace where they could
get away with all the things they're gettin' away with now and
still not have to give up all the luxuries by havin' to fight or live
in a jungle." He looked at me anxiously. "I couldn't be had up
for what I'm sayin*, could I?" he asked.

I laughed. "I don't know. It would depend on who heard it.
You needn't worry about me, but when you're away from here
I wouldn't take any chances. The regular Army is filled with
pompous little jerks."

He was leaning back now as if he were relaxed over reliev-
ing his soul and saying what he'd wanted to say for a long
time. Then he sat up suddenly and said, "There's still one thing
that's worryin' me, Captain. When am I gonna get a chance to
get off this island and get on a bender and see some women?'*

[98 ]

"I can't answer that/" I said. 'I've written twice to headquar-
ters to get leave for all of you. It can't be all at once but in turn.
IVe put you at the head of this list The only reply is that you
are all urgently needed here in line of duty. The second letter
they didn't even bother to answer."

"Line of duty! Christ! Why don't they just give all this crap
in the Quonset huts to these fuzzy-wuzzies and call it a day. It
would be a lot cheaper. God knows why they ever unloaded the
stuff here in the first place. Here we are guardin' the hell out of
it as if it was gold and diamonds, and after we spend the best
years of our Me here they'll finally remember us and let us get
back to civilization and then dump the stuff into the sea. They
won't even give it to these bloody starvin' natives."

"If I'm here, 111 see to that," I said.

"Yes, but you'll be disobeyin' orders. Orders! Christ!" He
actually spat on my clean floor in disgust. "Who knows where
they come from? Half the time it's from some jerk in Washing-
ton or even maybe just a woman clerk. They never know
nothing. It's just according to whether they wake up that morn-
ing constipated."

"Another drink?" I suggested, aware that for the first time I
was really seeing inside the Sergeant. But he was cautious.

"No thanks, Captain. Better not Christ knows what I might
say."

He stood up. "You know what I think? I think our whole
bloody country is goin* to the dogs and fast. It's gettin* just
like any of the second-rate countries anywhere. And I gotta get
outa here, Major. I gotta get out. I'm getting crazy ideas . . .
ideas like I never had before in my life. I gotta get outa here
and go on a bust and lay some women. Jesus! I'm gonna blow
up!"

As if to emphasize the passion of his outburst there was a
sudden crash of thunder and the rain began to come down again
as if someone had pulled the chain on a gigantic shower bath
of lukewarm water.

"That goddamn rain!" said the Sergeant

"What do you mean by getting crazy ideas? What ideas?"

[99]

He was quiet again. "Never mind/* lie said. "I ain't gonna tell
you. It's about all I can do to face *em myself." He picked up
ids oilskin poncho. "I'm goin* back to the hut and try to sleep.
You'd better get some shut-eye yourself. I ain't slept so well
myself lately, and every night I keep wakin' up and every time
I look across I can see a light over here." He looked at me
sharply. "What's the matter? You getting ideas too?"

I grinned. "Maybe. Maybe you'd call it that. I'm thinking
. . . and sometimes writing,"

'What the hell can you find to write about out here? Nothing
ever happens. Jesus, I write to a couple of girls back home just
in case I get outa this hell hole sometime and might need 'em
again. . . . But I can't find a damned thing to write about
except you know what and if I put what I was thinking on
paper the censor would send for me all the way from Pearl
Harbor and put me in the jug. Jesus! I even find myself makin*
pictures of it. Is that what you're writin'?"

"No, not altogether, but that has something to do with it/*

He flung the poncho around him and said, "I wish I could
write if only to get some of what's drivin' me nuts outta my
system. Thanks, Captain, for the drink and the chance to talk.
You see, them other guys is so young and inexperienced they
don't understand what you're talkin* about/'

"Sure, Sergeant. Whenever you want to let off steam, come in
and talk/'

He went out of the door and the rain came down so thickly
that he disappeared before he had gone more than ten feet. The
sound on the corrugated roof was deafening. When he had come
I had been annoyed because he had interrupted my work, and
now that he was gone I felt suddenly at loose ends, wishing he
had stayed on to talk. I wondered what the crazy thoughts
could be which disturbed him so much. They might be serious
or they might be nothing at all. People's ideas of what is crazy
or dangerous or what is sin vary so greatly according, largely,
to whether they are brought up Catholic or Methodist or Jewish

[ 100]

or some other damned thing that you can't even guess very
accurately about anybody.

His suggestion that there were Japs hiding somewhere about
us in the jungle was disturbing. Although I had pooh-poohed the
suggestion I could not altogether dismiss it. They were such
hardy, tough little bastards, so determined to go on living, ex-
cept when they were hysterical in the face of guns or a flame-
thrower, that nothing was altogether impossible for them. They
might have swum the forty-mile channel or made themselves a
raft and paddled across under cover of darkness. They might
even have done what was even more impossible fought their
way through a hundred miles of horrible, tangled jungle. If they
were around, if they were able to break into the hut without
ever being heard or detected, then all of us might well be in
danger of our lives. They could slip in while we were asleep and
cut our throats or, if they got hold of any of the grenade supply,
blow us all up with no trouble at all. There certainly wasn't
anything pleasant about it.

After the Sergeant had gone I went back to my writing, in
which I had just finished setting down the visit to Frank's
family and the glimpse of the world I found among them, but
when I tried to go back I couldn't get anywhere. Nothing would
come out of my brain onto the sheets of paper and I gave it up. I
wasn't ready yet for the next part. I hadn't digested it yet. It
hadn't gone through the process of gestation, coming out clear
and formed and understood and developed.

Idly I picked up the letter from Enid which a plane had
dropped down on me with the other mail late this afternoon. We
get mail about once every three weeks when a plane goes
about over the islands dropping mail upon all the godforsaken,
forgotten souls isolated like ourselves. For the moment there was
something almost pleasant about seeing the handwriting be-
cause it involved a life so remote from the one I had been lead-
ing for months, a life which some day I might know again.

The letter began, "Darling," which at once set my teeth on
edge again. It was an expression Enid perpetually used which

1 101 ]

always seemed false to me because it is a term which should be
used in only two sets of circumstances. Either it is the meaning-
less expression used by a silly gushing woman indiscriminately
and to eveiyone including the butcher or it is a term of passion
shared only by two people to the exclusion of all else in the
world. In the case of Enid neither use was justified. She was not
the silly gushing type, Heaven knows, and certainly no such
passion existed between us even in the beginning. If she had
written, "Dear Hank," I would not have been annoyed. I would
even have been pleased because it seemed friendly and normal,
but "Darling" was superheated and false and a part of that
interminable "acting/* Thinking about this I suddenly wished
that she had been the type who could have addressed me as
"Honey" or "Sugar," for there is in the words something at once
comical and friendly and warm, like the playfulness of certain
uninhibited happy people in the midst of making love. But that
did not suit her either. It would have been as false and as revolt-
ing as "Darling," I would have settled for "Dear Hank," which
she used to call me when we went about together as kids, but of
course that didn't suit the picture of our relations as she wanted
them to appear to the world. Funny how even a single little word
can make you happy or unhappy or filled with distaste when it
is all wrong and used out of character.

Darling [she wrote], I haven't heard from you for three weeks
and hope there's nothing wrong. I was a little surprised to hear
that you didn't mind the life you're leading. One of the Hazeltine
boys who's just back, looking like a skeleton from fever, says the
life on those islands is hell, especially if there isn't a club or a
bar or anything. But you always were peculiar about some
things and I guess you've gotten more peculiar as time goes on.
They say geniuses are peculiar. Maybe you're a genius. Ha! Hal

There isn't much news to write. The children are well and
miss you. Ronnie isn't doing too well at school and I had him
examined thoroughly eyes, ears, nose, everything but the
doctors could find nothing the matter with him. He just says he
doesn't like school, so I suppose I'll have to work on him to

[ 102]

make him like it. I've been reading books on the subject and one
of them says that sometimes children who don't like school
have secret frustrations and irritations at home but I know that
can't be. Everything runs so smoothly here. It's not because he
isn't bright. He's always asking questions sometimes about things
he shouldn't be asking. That's where a boy his age needs a
father. I've tried to explain to him but 111 be glad when you're
back and can take him over. It'll please you to hear that he says
home isn't the same with you away. When I asked him what he
meant, he just said, <f l don't know. It's like the house had got
cold and foggy." So there's a tradelast. How about one from you?

Esther is all right. She's a good child and never has made
any trouble. She seems always to understand, and when I'm in
the dumps over your being away, she'll come and put her arms
about me and say, "Darling, don't feel bad. Daddy'll be home
soon, and when he comes back hell love you more than ever."
Isn't that wonderful? She isn't a bit like Ronnie who sometimes
seems to me cold and actually hostile.

The Ferguson boy was killed at Okinawa. I suppose it is a
blow to them but he always seemed to me unattractive and
fresh and, after all, he did make them a great deal of trouble
with the girl from the wrong side of the tracks and being sued
in that automobile accident. And the Villars boy is reported
missing. I feel sorry for them losing an only child like that.
Sometimes war does seem senseless but what are we to do but
fight when it is forced on us?

I've sent you a package and I hope somebody else doesn't
get it. I won't tell you what's in it. I want you to be surprised.
I had the heating system gone over and it was frightfully
expensive. Oh, yes, I forgot to say that I had to have the hedge
taken out. Something got into it, bugs or something, or it wasn't
trimmed properly, and it got to looking mangier and mangier
so that I was ashamed of it. It really made the whole property
look shabby and dirty. And it always made me feel that I was
being shut in and smothered. I hope you don't mind too much.
I did do my best to take care of it but I seem to have the
opposite of a green thumb. I have only to touch something to
have it witihter and die. The roses aren't too bad. I've followed
your directions but they still have spots and the prettiest blooms
' [ 103 ]

were eaten up by some land of awful beetle. IVe had to buy
flowers for the House when I have people to dinner. I always
pretend they come out of the garden so you needn't feel
ashamed. '

Your mother stopped off here last week for a day and night.
She's been on some kind of a tour got up by one of her organ-
izations to sell war bonds. She looked very old and tired and I
had quite a long talk with her, pointing out that she wasn't
young any longer and couldn't stand what she used to, but it
was like talking to a stone wall. I tried to make her rest as much
as possible while she was here. You must try, darling, to write
her more often. She seemed very hurt and jealous that I got
more letters from you than she did. You know how she is.

I'd write more often but it seems almost futile as there's never
any certainty when you'll get the letter or whether you'll get it
at all. I'm going up to New York for the annual meeting of
the class alumni. Wish you were going to be along. The
country club seems very fanny with hardly any men around.
They get fewer and fewer only boys or old men. It seems so
useless for you to be out there in the middle of the Pacific doing
nothing when you could be so happy here in the Me you've
built up for your wife and children.

Now take care of yourself and when you come home we'll
make up for all the lost months and years. You can't imagine
how lonely I feel every time I look at your empty bed. And
write me ... you don't know what your letters mean to me.

Enid.

Well, that was it. A nice letter. Exactly the kind of letter which
would be written by a loving wife to a loving husband, from
a wife who felt real concern about her husband's mother and
left not a stone unturned for the physical welfare of his children
... a wife you could leave behind and know that she would
remain faithful and that everything would be well managed,
except perhaps for things like the hedge. Yes, a nice letter . . .
impeccable ... a model . . . But, . . . But what? ... It was the
kind of letter an actor reads aloud in a play on the stage. It
was also the letter of a bitch whose bitchery you would never
be able to pin down and dissect.

[ 104]

I went to bed and turned off the light so the Sergeant wouldn't
be disturbed about me when lie awakened with his own worries
and torments. At least I didn't feel the need to go on a bender
and see some women. But I was worried about the children, for
I knew suddenly that Ronnie, at twelve, was already beginning
to get the pitch and that Esther was going the other way. She
was beginning already to act her part so that the production
wouldn't be spoiled.

V\\ Oakdale

WHAT is LOVE? i DON'T KNOW. DO YOU? i DON'T KNOW BE-
cause it is so many things and because in reality I have had so
little experience. Is it sentiment? Is it mere lechery? Does it in-
volve tenderness? Yes, but it also involves cruelty and jealousy
and treachery. Is it the calculated sensuality of the voluptuary or
the frustrated sublimations of a gelded Abelard and an intellec-
tual Heloise? Is it something to be set on one side, formed, made
rigid by convention or fear? It is certainly the most carelessly used
word in the English language. It is used for God, for women, for
heterosexual and homosexual relationships, for children, for
mothers, for wives, for mistresses, for pets. The French are much
better in their definition of love. When you say amour in French
you know what is meant with no nonsense, but 'love" is a mean-
ingless word in English. Odd too, because English is the richest
of all languages but curiously also the least definite and the most
vague. Perhaps that is why it has produced the richest and finest
poetry in the world. Fine poetry is always like a beautiful struc-
ture partially enveloped in mist.

Love is so changeable and so shifting. There are times out
here in the islands when I feel greater affection or even love for
the dog I left behind than I do. for my wife and children. Some-
times I speculate on what member of my household I should
like most to have with me here in order to keep me company,

[ 105]

Nearly always the answer comes out, "Why, Sandy, my dog. Of
course!" I think what I miss most is having him come to me and
put his head between my legs, looking up at me with eyes which
speak and yet cannot speak. Perhaps it is vanity, the satisfaction
of being worshiped. But it is not altogether that. The extraordi-
nary thing is that I feel closer to him than to my own wife and
children. He is a wonderful companion. I think we understand
each other completely. I think he understands each of us in the
family better than we understand each other. He regards Ronnie
as an equal with whom he romps and rassels, never hesitating to
take a good bite if Ronnie is unfair or too rough. Esther he
simply ignores, I suspect because he thinks her rather prissy and
no fun. If, as sometimes happens, we forget to put him out and
he lifts his leg somewhere below stairs, Esther screams and be-
haves as if the house were burning down, rushing to her mother
and screaming, "Mummy! Mummy! Sandy's done it again!'*

He will go to Enid when she calls him and will submit to being
stroked and petted. He is very polite about it, but he under-
stands, I think, that the petting is not spontaneous. It is an act, a
performance in which she finds far more pleasure than he finds.
She is thinking without thinking, "What a pretty picture this
makes!" The odd thing is that at times she is jealous of the dog,
that at times she hates him because he reaches me, something
which she has not been able to do for a long time, if indeed she
was ever able to do it. He is a not very good Irish setter and a
terrible tramp at heart, but I am more worried about him than
I am about Ronnie's doing badly at school. I am always troubled
lest Enid turn him out at night. I know that the moment I left
the house she shut him up each night in the cellar. He had
always been permitted to sleep on a special chair in the rumpus
room while I was at home, and I always wanted secretly to have
him in the bedroom but I never quite dared, any more than
for years I dared demand a separate room for myself. Enid is
one of those women who puts the neatness of her house above
the happiness and welfare of her husband, her children, or any
pet. She would have made an unholy row at having a dog in the

[ 106]

bedroom. Fortunately, as an experienced tramp he probably
knows how to take care of himself.

I haven't had much experience with love, but I have read a
great deal about it, mostly in the two or three years before I
came out here. I learned to read a whole book in college because
I had a good professor in literature it was the only thing I did
learn but after I left I slipped back again. I read nothing but
mystery stories until a few years ago. It was about the time I
found out that the endless running about in crowds, usually
well loaded with liquor, had become unendurable. Save for the
rose garden I had no hobby, and I had to find something to do
with my time, especially during the long winter months. Also I
found that reading, after a time, became a defense against Enid's
endless talking and gossip. If I concentrated so that I could not
hear what she was saying, she would eventually give up the
struggle and sulk. I did not mind the sulking so long as she kept
quiet.

She did not like reading herself. There are so many women
and men too like her back in the States. They have been through
school and college without ever having learned to read or to
enjoy the peculiar pleasure of ideas; people who can really talk
about nothing whatever but their immediate occupations and
activities. The most they ever read is the more sensational items
in the newspapers, the comics, the sports, and easily predigested
things out of the Readers Digest and similar publications. It is a
fault perhaps of our mechanical, materialist, complex, rushed
civilization, but it is a fault too of our colleges and universities,

So many men and women I know seem to have learned or at
least retained nothing whatever from the experience of having
gone to college. Some of them even leave college without being
able to spell or to write or speak grammatically. At times it
seems to rne almost impossible that they have been to college
and have learned so little. They must have gotten good enough
marks to have remained in school, yet the residue of learning ap-
pears to be nothing. They seem to believe that education ended
on the day they left the university, that there is something

[ 107]

magical about a college degree, and that there could not pos-
sibly be anything more to be learned. The job is over and they
can relax.

Enid is like that. She graduated from a great and famous
women's college but she seems to know nothing and to be
interested in little beyond the daily activities of her life. She is
always fussing about. Most of her friends are like her. They
have, most of them, had all the advantages of prosperity and
education, but the result has been nil. It has always been im-
possible to discuss anything with Enid which required any con-
centration or any thinking. She seems to have no background of
history or economics or politics. Her reactions are almost entirely
emotional. In the beginning she was all for Roosevelt as a second
Jesus Christ and now she hates him because taxes are high and
she can't get butter when she wants it. The idea that he might
be something in between or a charlatan or a demagogue is
much too complex for her consideration. She belongs to the
League of Women Voters and is active in the Association of
University Women, and periodically she comes home from one or
the other, all steamed up about some new idea World Feder-
ation or the W.P.A. or something else about which some woman
has given a speech, but she never understands what it is all
about and after a few days the enthusiasm dies away.

After the honeymoon a husband and wife begin to have need
of something besides bed to hold them together. Was it St.
Simon who said that great mistresses, wielding great power
and maintaining their positions, were rarely beautiful women in
the accepted sense? They were always clever and entertaining
and more often than not plain. A man cannot stay in bed
twenty-four hours a day.

So after our own honeymoon I found our mutual intellectual
life a pretty sterile affair. It was impossible to discuss anything
with Enid ideas or anything important or politics and eco-
nomics. The discussion promptly became so muddled and eventu-
ally so emotional that it ended in a quarrel or with some bitter
and savage remark on my own part, not that I am an intellectual
genius or in any sense brilliant, but because I suppose most men

[ 108 ]

axe more logical and more thorough and more objective than
women. Not many women find pleasure in the workings of logic
or the mere fact of knowing. I suppose that is one of tie reasons
why even the greatest dressmakers and cooks are usually men,
"because they employ these elements even in fields which are
popularly regarded as belonging to the female sex. More madden-
ing than any other qualify was her capacity for inevitably turning
every discussion into a personal affair. Eventually everything,
even the weather, became related to her own ego. If during the
period of hero worship of Roosevelt I uttered even the faintest
criticism, it became a personal insult to her.

In any case I took to reading as a defense and a refuge from
the sterility and superficiality of my home life and indeed of all
the life which surrounded me. And as I read I began to redis-
cover the immense pleasure of reading, the pleasure of losing
myself in a good novel in which from the first page I entered
a world as real to me or perhaps more real than the life all about
me, or the pleasure of following an idea, skillfully and meticu-
lously worked out to the very end. I even began to read books
on philosophy. And all this tended to isolate me and make more
unendurable those excursions into suburban society which began
to be actual incursions upon my solitude and my own inner life.
I could not enjoy myself, even after I had drunk a half-dozen
strong martinis which at one time in my life had helped
enormously. I only grew sullen and resentful, thinking always,
above the clatter, that I wanted to be at home exploring title
new worlds which I was discovering. It was all a part of the
same trouble . . . which began that morning long ago with my
actually seeing myself for the first time in the bathroom mirror.

We are coming back now to love, for it was out of these books
that I began to discover how complex and varied a thing love
could be. I should properly use the word amour because that is
the kind of love I am writing about, not love of God or children
or the Parent-Teacher Association or love in any of its careless
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant connotations . . . just good old Greek
and Latin amour.

I began to discover that there were things far beyond my own

[ 109 ]

experience which had properly to do with love or amour, I
began to make the amazing discovery that love could be a thing
in itself, justifying itself as an art or even a career, that love
and the vigor and vitality which it engendered could in itself
become a creative force of great fertility. And I began to discover
the variety of love and to understand many things about myself
which I had not understood before, why I experienced certain
emotions, why I did certain things, why I had felt warm and
eager rushes of affection toward certain girls and even certain
boys during my adolescence, why some pretty women attracted
me and others, equally pretty, did not, why I had never loved
my own mother and resented the fierce proprietary interest
and even desire to possess and control me which went on in
the very face of her obvious neglect of me in the role of mother.
I began to understand why an act which I had once enjoyed
with Enid had become in fact an act that was distasteful and
could only be carried through because of my own vitality,
mechanically, and somewhat as I would take liver pills when I
felt bilious. This indeed was a long way from love or amour, and
I began to see that actually the whole act in relation to Enid was
degrading and worse perhaps than any act of perversity. At last,
of course, it became intolerable and came to an end but not
before I had come close to a real nervous breakdown and lost a
great deal of weight.

And I began to understand what it was that drove some of the
men of my acquaintance to what could only be described as
sordid debauchery and lust on the occasions when they went
to places like New Orleans or Chicago on conventions. In short,
I began to understand too many things for my own good and
perhaps for the good of those about me. I began to see in the
men and women with whom I associated things which they be-
lieved hidden and perhaps were hidden to most people and to
see things in them which they did not even know or recognize and
admit about themselves. And that only widened the gulf between
me and them. If there had been someone with whom I could have
talked about these things, frankly and with interest and in confi-

[ HO]

dence, it would perhaps have been all right But there was no one,
least o all Enid.

When I first took to reading she thought the whole thing was
just a phase and would pass quickly enough, as a great many
former enthusiasms of mine had passed because they were only
a part of the restlessness I did not understand and the search for
something on which I could take a strong hold, something to
which I might attach myself and find both interest and stability.

But when the passion for reading grew and there was no sign
of its passing and I refused now and then to go to the eternal
barbecues and cocktail parties that were always exactly the same,
she decided she would try to share .my passion and so bring us
more closely together. But despite the fierceness of the original
purpose to possess me and to have us share everything as if we
were one person, she could not follow me into that world which
I had discovered without her. Reading bored her, indeed so
much that she could not even get through a fairly readable good
novel in order to be able to discuss it afterward. If she did
attempt a discussion I discovered that she had missed the whole
point of the book, partly because she had read it in a hasty,
bored, and superficial way, but mostly because she was always
identifying herself with one of the characters, usually the one
the author had satirized. She did not see the satire. She was
as calloused to an understanding of satire as a hundred-year-
old turtle. She simply looked upon the satirized character as
maligned and abused, and sometimes she observed that the
author must be a horrible, degenerate person without any
standards or morals.

But it was above all the boredom and the necessity and effort
of a moderate degree of concentration which defeated and pre-
vented her invasion of the world I had discovered. Of all things,
she took a shot at reading Proust, and of all books, Sodom and
Gomorrah, called in translation The Cities of the Plain. This was
at the height of her effort and she stuck to it stubbornly, but she
managed to read most of the book without the least understand-
ing of what was going on or the faintest perception of the true

[ in i

character of the Baron Charlus. I did not enlighten her because
I knew she would only say, "I don't like to discuss such dirty
things/' and that would have been the end of it.

I must confess that I did not find Proust easy reading, but I
will say that he is the only author I have ever read who is able
to keep boredom and fascination both in the air at the same
time. And despite all the complications and complexities of his
style and content I was fascinated for a wholly unliterary reason.
I was fascinated by a world so different from anything I had
ever known that I might have been reading a book about
people living on Mars or the moon a life which, however deca-
dent, seemed as rich and exciting as my own daily life was
mechanical and sterile and empty from the day I looked at my-
self in the mirror.

I got most of the books from the Crescent City Carnegie Pub-
lic Library with the advice of Miss Pritchard, a middle-aged and
rather attractive spinster who must have led an intense inner life
unrevealed to the patrons of the library. She seemed to have
read everything or at least to be able to tell you what kind of
book it was and whether it was difficult or easy reading. Out-
wardly her life revolved entirely around books and the library,
with occasional excursions to library conventions or to the Rocky
Mountains on holidays, and I think she was a little astonished
when I first appeared and asked for some good reading. She
advised me, and after a little while she began to discern what it
was I liked and steered me in the proper direction. She led me
into getting the New York book reviews and out of them I found
books which I wanted especially to read. Twice when I asked her
about specific books she laughed and said, < We couldn't carry
those here. If some of our more respectable readers took them
out, there would be an awful row with the library board. It isn't
always what you or I might think was the dirtiest book. It's the
kind of book that rubs their noses in what they don't want to see.
That's what always stirs up trouble. A lot of them rather like
what you or I might think were really dirty books. It's the ones
that stir them up that they hate and consider dirty."

I H2]

I think it was that remark which revealed to both of us that
we understood a good many things in the same way. The books
which she dared not suggest to the library board I ordered by
mail from New York. These became, therefore, virtually the only
books I owned and the nucleus of a library decidedly of an
erotic nature, which infuriated Enid and I must confess did give
a wholly false picture of reading tastes which otherwise were
fairly catholic. If I died suddenly by my own hand and someone
took to investigating he would probably come to the conclusion,
on finding that pitifully small library, that I had been obviously
deranged through an obsession over sex, which would not have
been true at all since such books were only a small proportion
of the sum total of my reading.

However, I did develop a lively interest in the substance and
the technique of love, partly, I think, because I had been until
then comparatively innocent and each discovery came to me with
surprise and even with astonishment. What I had known or even
suspected dimly had before then come into my consciousness as
facts which were suppressed, dirty, dimmed, and generally re-
garded as shocking and as exceptional in practice as murder.
Generally speaking there was a rabbit-like act and that was all.
Anything else was dirty. It was tragic but true, and I think that
the same attitude was shared by most of the men I knew. It was
only when they became older, brutally unfaithful, and went ex-
ploring at convention time that they ever extended the borders
of love-making, and by that time there was not much beauty and
no tenderness in it but only an animal-like quality of lust and rut-
ting. That too is tragic but true.

As for the women I cannot speak with so much authority, but
many of them at middle age or after developed the same air of
urgency and desperation and promiscuousness and lust as if at
last, too late, they had discovered desire but not love or tender-
ness or beauty. By instinct and sometimes through the greater
knowledge of some more experienced partner they discovered the
technique of love so late that it could only be practiced with a
land of harsh and indiscriminate animality. Too many times there

[ 113 ]

was in our world in Crescent City the spectacle of a man and
woman who had lost interest in each other and drifted apart,
practicing separately and promiscuously, witli virtual strangers, a
love-making which in the beginning when they had first come
together would have been beautiful and full of satisfaction but
once they had drifted apart became merely a sensual exercise
which left them afterward perpetually cold and exhausted and
sometimes filled with shame and remorse like the men coming
home on a cold gray train from a convention.

How then could this come about? The root of it must lie deep
in the puritanical Protestant past of all that is our culture, wherein
for generations the idea of sex has been looked upon as shameful
and even by some as distasteful. What a preposterous and pre-
tentious business is such an attitude! that man (or woman)
should think himself stronger than the forces of the universe or
to believe that he (or she) was so vastly different from his
fellow animals. The belief has in itself corrupted the very word
*love" and diffused its meaning, making it at once silly and trivial,
gross and sordid. Silliest of all perhaps are those who profess to
believe that a man and woman should cohabit only with the pur-
pose of having children. I think that Enid perhaps had that idea
dimly in mind when we were first married, and then presently
she found out that few practiced so rigorous and absurd a doc-
trine and that she must "give in" in order to hold me. She was
always reading articles in women's magazines and "sob sister"
columns on how to Tiold" a husband.

I know that I got enlightenment neither from my mother nor
my father save in a roundabout way. My father was always so
remote from me that to have discussed such a thing as the facts
of life would have seemed to him like corrupting a strange small
boy. My mother did it by books, leaving a "modern" pamphlet
recommended by one of her women's organizations on the table
in my room where I would be certain to find it. By then it was
too late, for I already knew more than the pamphlet contained
and knew it with a detail and sureness which certainly the
pamphlet did not contain. It was hazy about everything and very

[114]

dull reading. By that time (I think I was thirteen) I already knew
from haymow experience how little girls were made and had
even had with Eva Smart (one of those local bad girls three years
older than myself) a fumbling experience in which I found little
excitement or pleasure. And of course at Hargreaves" farm I had
long since learned the facts of breeding and birth and learned
other things from the naked little boys at the swimming hole.

If I had been let alone I should have approached the whole
question with a fair degree of simplicity and naturalness, but I
was not permitted either simplicity or naturalness. The very atti-
tude of my parents, the silence of my father, and the placing of
the pamphlets by my mother where I might find them implied
that the whole thing was shameful and must not be mentioned.
At the same time that the whole campaign sought to suppress
the whole idea of sex, it actually served only to give it an exag-
gerated and distorted importance.

But it did not end there. At the Y.M.C.A., where we went to
swim and had as payment to listen at times to the lectures by
the physical director on sex hygiene, the subject was dragged up
and made not only shameful but hideous through dreadful warn-
ings about venereal disease and even revolting colored slides
depicting the horrible price paid by those who "sinned/* The
whole process was one of creating horror and of making every-
thing connected with sex or even love as revolting as possible.

I wonder how many suicides, how much wretchedness, how
much homosexuality was created out of the sessions on sex
hygiene. And sitting out here in the jungle, I wonder what they
are offering to boys today, now that antibiotics have reduced the
wages of sin to the level of a cold in the head, only more quickly
and easily cured.

I never have been able to discover how much Enid knew when
I married her. It was one of those things which you could never
possibly discuss with her because she was incapable of detach-
ment or objectivity in anything you discussed and because there
was in her none of the merriness which in some women makes of
the marital relationship a laughing and satisfactory affair. Her

[ US]

mother was a prim woman whom it was impossible to imagine in
any such situation as an accouplement. Yet she and her husband
occupied a double bed throughout their existence* Very likely she
pretended to herself that it was not happening.

Concerning Enid I only knew that she was awkward and sub-
missive in the beginning and I was not much help since the only
experience I had had might have been classified as mechanical.
I was of course, by many standards, experienced, for many an
American husband goes into marriage a virgin with a textbook in
one hand, but I was certainly not a lover calculated to make a
woman happy or to create out of the contact anything more than
a conventional act brought about quickly and awkwardly through
the pressure of vitality and good health.

I think I understood the whole of our life together in one flash
when, after I had taken to reading a great deal and years after
we were married, I attempted to put into practice a caress of
which I had read. I felt Enid's body stiffen and heard her say,
"Don't! Where did you learn such a filthy trick?"

That was the end and we were never together again- Yet in
that single episode there lay the seeds of long and deep tragedy
and the bitter sterility of that life together in which there was
never any real satisfaction or pleasure for either of us. After that
something died completely in me, and I knew that even when
she kissed me in public for show there was no feeling behind it
and that the gesture was the falsest of all the performances she
gave.

Why was it all like that? I don't know. It is one of the things I
am trying to discover in writing this all down. I am trying to dis-
cover why two people who, until they were married, had been
treated kindly by life should have made such a dull and empty
mess of things. It would have been better, I think, if we had
quarreled violently, if I had beaten her, even if we had separated
and divorced. In that way each of us might have had another
chance before it was too late. In that way, through quarrels and
violence and passion, we might even have broken down the things
which paralyzed us and kept us apart. In that way I might have

t 116]

roused something in her which in the end would have brought
us together so that we really shared each other. That was the one
thing she most desired and the one thing at which she always
acted, yet which she prevented by every thought and action.
It never occurred even for a second in all our lives together.

In the beginning it started off all right. We married eacli other
because it was the thing to do what might be called a "natural."
On my own side I was a young and vigorous man who needed
either marriage or some relationship which might act as a release
both physically and emotionally. It is bad for a young man of
average vigor to hold himself in for too long (see St. Paul). And
this urgency became translated in mind and even in my body
into the delusion that I was in love with Enid. She was at hand.
She was fresh and young and pretty. The idea pleased both sets
of parents. We would marry and start our lif e together in a small
but luxurious house. I would inherit an excellent business and
she would come into some money if everything went well. I had
been already two years out of college when she was graduated.

I was one of the few young men who had an automobile of
my own, and in that first summer the courtship was largely car-
ried on in the automobile and on picnics and sometimes on the
golf course of the country club. All this is considered ideal, yet I
see now that we had no special fun out of it Some uninhibited
pair of Slovenes or Italians from the Flats along the river would
have had infinitely more fun and pleasure and they would have
been a great deal closer both to God and nature, from which our
middle-class Protestant upbringing had shut us out Once or twice
when I was aroused I had put my hand on her thigh while driv-
ing, but each time she pushed it away and afterward she had
sulked. Once she said, "Let's not put it on that vulgar basis/* On
what other basis ought a young couple about to marry put such
a relationship? What but that basis was the fundamental purpose
of marriage?

If I had had any experience I would have known then that
what came afterward was inevitable, or if I had had enough
experience I might have changed her afterward. But young men

[ 117]

of my age did not have experience or often enough, if they had it,
it was of the wrong kind. Of course if we had been like Paul
and Virginia, simply two children of nature coming together
spontaneously as we reached the age of ripeness, everything
would have been natural and simple and playful, but it was not
like that. We had both been wrapped in cocoons, different yet
alike, of inhibitions, of shames, of hearsay, of convention, of actual
horror, and she, of course, had had hammered in her since birth
the idea that a girl must not only be a virgin if she ever expected
to make a proper marriage but that she must behave even as if
the touch of a man's hand on her thigh might make her pregnant.
It would be funny if it did not lie at the root of so much suffer-
ing, so many divorces, and even on occasion of murder.

You see, what I am trying to get at is this where did all this
come from and why did such superstitions and nightmares and
shames exist? Perhaps it will be different with many of the young
people in the future and I have been told that it is different with
the boys and girls now growing up. Certainly they are all far
more mature for their ages than we were when we married.
Young people and indeed all people are to some extent the prod-
ucts of the forces of the generations and times in which they
live. These young people coming up in a distraught and trying
world are perhaps like the young people of the eighteenth century
when Pitt at twenty-one was Prime Minister of the British Empire
and men and women assumed responsibilities before they were
properly of age. Most men of my acquaintance and age, what-
ever the number of their years, have in reality never reached the
age of twenty-one.

I wonder whether there was less morality and less suffering in
a bawdy time like that of the Restoration than in a dull respect-
able hypocritical age such as the Victorians knew. I doubt it.

You see, I keep fumbling and fumbling, trying to unravel the
tangled skeins that lie behind my own personal emptiness and
the futility of my life as a family man and a member of a com-
munity and, indeed, that lie behind so much of the hysterical
futility of all middle-class American life. And how little of our
life is not middle class, in one way or another?

Our wedding was conventional and fine with bridesmaids and
ushers and banks of white flowers and long articles in the society
columns of the newspapers as was befitting the marriage between
the "scions" of two of the first families of the town. There was
even champagne to drink which was considered rather daring,
and rice and confetti were showered on the young pair as they
drove off in the new automobile that was the gift of the bride-
groom's father.

I asked Frank Saunders to be one of my ushers, but he wrote
a polite letter saying that unfortunately he expected to be in
Europe at the time of the wedding. He sent us a handsome silver
card tray. I blushed when I got his answer because I knew all the
time that he would never accept the invitation. I had blushed
even when I wrote inviting him to be an usher. I knew somehow
that he was through with me, bored with me, and would never
see me again save by accident, but I wanted him to come. In my
heart there was, I suppose, still a kind of hero worship for him
because there was in him something dark and wicked and free,
and I would never be any of these things. And there was no
doubt that he would bring a certain "class" to the wedding which
none of the others could possibly contribute. The girls would all
fall in love with him, as girls usually did. And I still wanted to
be friends with him. He would have made a difference to the
whole of the occasion. There was a radiance and a dash about
him which would, I knew, lift the whole tone of the thing. But I
knew all along that he would not come. He had better things
to do.

We drove away from the wedding in the late afternoon to
spend the night in Kentucky, and most of the way Enid talked
about how well the wedding had gone off and how well the
bridesmaids looked in the dresses she had herself designed and
how Mary Everly had had too much champagne and so on, as if
nothing had happened that was to change both of us, to bring us
happiness or suffering, as if the greatest thing that can happen to
two young people had not occurred at all. It was as if, instead of
being married, we had just left the Saturday-night country club
dance and were driving home and I would presently stop .the

t 119 ]

car in front of her house and come in and sit for a little while
and then leave her and go back to my own home.

But I was scared. While I listened to her talk there were even
moments when I doubted that I had done the right thing in get-
ting married. It meant that I would have to settle down and now
perhaps would never have a chance to do all those things-r-
travel and visit far exotic places which I had dreamed of in
more romantic moments. At any rate I now had the right to place
my hand on her thigh and I did so, as if to claim possession of
her. This time she did not withdraw or stiffen. She simply went
on talking about the wedding as if the hand were not there at all.
And I found myself thinking, rather bitterly at so early a stage,
*Yes. She has got her man. Everything is settled and she doesn't
need to worry any more/* Because this was for good. That was
the way we were brought up. It was for good.

There is something frightening about that thought, and it must
have come to hundreds of young bridegrooms just as it came to
me at just that moment. Oh, I was impatient. I was anticipating
what was to happen that night when we reached the inn but I
realize now that the impatience, and even whatever desire I
experienced, was a kind of abstract desire not especially for Enid
but for women or any woman and as such was somehow detached
from the workings of my mind. If suddenly we had been drawn
together spontaneously and kissed with no holding back, with no
shyness or fear, everything would have been different. But it did
not happen that way, and I am afraid that in our world it seldom
does save with the Blessed who have a whole and frank delight
in each other with no hypocrisies and no deceits and cocoons of
convention.

Ronnie was born three years after we were married and Esther
arrived two years later. There was no effort to arrange this. It
merely happened that way, and it happened that we never had
any more children because at Esther's birth something went
wrong. It could possibly have been repaired, but neither of us
did anything about it or even discussed the matter. I don't know
whether Enid would have liked more children and I don't know

[120 ]

even about myself. I think that very probably in Enid's planned
scheme of things two children was just about right. It made what
she considered the perfect family.

As the children grew older they went to the Oakdale kinder-
garten and the right school and were taken to the country club
to run about or splash in the swimming pool. They played with
the other children in Oakdale and became accustomed at times
to the spectacle of parents their own and other children's par-
ents, respectable model parents who had had too many cocktails
and grew rather noisy and bawdy even before it was bedtime for
the children. They grew accustomed to the idea of their parents
moving about only in crowds and they listened to the hogwash
on the radio at certain fixed hours. Once or twice I tried reading
to them at bedtime, but they were only bored and restless and,
without perhaps enough perseverance, I gave up the whole thing.

By the time Ronnie was fourteen and Esther twelve (just
before I went into the Army) they were perfect average children
belonging in such a suburb as Oakdale with parents who were
well-off with two cars in the garage and beginning to think about
a third for the children. In the same year my mother arranged,
with a good deal of political conniving, I suspect, that we were
chosen as the State "Family of the Year" by the Federation of
Women's Clubs. It happened at exactly the period in which for
the first time I was planning the Perfect Crime.

The "award," I must say, rather startled me, first because, as I
well knew, it had been maneuvered by my mother despite her
dislike for Enid and her jealousy of her. I could only guess that
she wangled it because it gave her ego a reflected glory. It
startled me too because it seemed incredible that it had never
occurred to anyone that our home life was something far from
perfect and that the people around us had never suspected from
an exchange of glances between Enid and me or a bitter word
or phrase passing between us how false was the conception of
our "perfect life** together. Could it be that people saw or under-
stood so little? Could it be that there was among the women a
kind of mutual conspiracy in which they were joined with Enid to

[ 121 ]

make all their lives seem perfect? Could it be that there was a
conspiracy of silence never broken by any of them? Or could it
be that none of them expected more than we had and that mar-
riage with most of them had become merely an endurance test
involving the "quiet desperation" of which Thoreau writes? Or
perhaps the fault was in myself that I was too idealistic, that I
expected more than most men had any right to expect, not only
in my own personal and family life but from life in my own
small world and indeed from life in general. Could it be that
our lives, merely by comparison with those of the others, ap-
peared happy and complete?

If we were the model family and our life perfect, how wretched
a world must it be of which we were a part. But perhaps it was
merely a matter of discernment that the others never stopped
long enough or were alone long enough to know how wretched
they really were, how empty, how time-killing, how dead. What
we do not know does not hurt us. Perhaps I, myself, would never
have known but for the hateful glance in the mirror. Perhaps I
would never have known if, each time life seemed without savor
or a dull and dreary thing, I had merely taken another drink
one magic drink or two which would make tilings seem bright
again and make me seem brilliant and entertaining to myself.
Perhaps that was why there was so much drinking in Oakdale
that they could not face a single evening without the alcohol
which at once blurred and made brighter their existence.

Everyone seemed pleased about the honor, and if there were
any catty or vicious comments I did not hear them. Everyone
congratulated us and Enid's friends kept saying, "Darling, it's
wonderful! They couldn't have made a better choice!'' I suspect
that some of them said, "I don't see how she can put up with such
a dull fellow as Wolcott Ferris" and "Now that he's cut down on
his cocktails lie's worse than ever." But I never heard them.

The whole thing was a good deal of a bore. There were
photographers and newspaper people and pictures in the papers
and with all the material Enid started a scrap book in which, she
said, she meant to put "everything interesting that happened to

[ 122 ]

us." After tikis first burst of publicity there was nothing much to
put in the book but eventually the fact that I had won a com-
mission in the Army or the society-column accounts of the meet-
ing of the garden club at our house or the listing of our names as
among those present at the New Year's dance at the country club.

These garden clubs themselves were a curious manifestation
of the life in Oakdale. There were several of them in Crescent
City, all carefully graded in their membership according to in-
come and what was known as "social status." At the top on both
scores stood the Green Thumb Club of Oakdale, although what
the green thumb had to do with it I do not know, for not one
woman in ten had any knowledge or even any contact with gar-
dening. Most of them had no garden at all or their gardens were
entirely planted and cared for by working gardeners. It appeared
that they simply used the name "Garden Club" as an excuse for
one more huddling and an opportunity for gossip, and some of
them regarded the whole thing with a point of view colored by
snobbery. I even discovered that there was nationally a "right"
garden club organization and a "wrong" one. The "right" one
dominated the East and New England and the "wrong^ one
flourished in the South and the Middle West There were un-
doubtedly a few women who really loved gardening and worked
at it and had an abundant knowledge about soils and plants, and
these were the ones who arranged the programs and got the
speakers, but when the moment came for the speaker the ladies
had great difficulty in suppressing the general chitchat which the
others found far more interesting than the speaker or anything
she had to say. Once I was asked to talk to them regarding the
growing of roses because I had done a good job at it and had
the best roses in Oakdale. Enid was a leading member of the
Green Thumb Club although she had no interest whatever in
gardening.

My mother came to visit us during all the hubbub about the
honor of being chosen the "Family of the Year" and was of course
included in all the photographs as the perfect mother-in-law and
grandmother, something which exasperated Enid to the point of

[ 123 ]

fury so that for two days life at home was very nearly intolerable,
not because of any open quarrel, but because of what was much
worse the vicious backhanded digs which they made at each
other.

And all the time I was planning the Perfect Crime.

I don't know exactly how it began, but I think it came out of
the daydreaming which seemed to increase the more I read. In
the daydreaming I found myself thinking what life would be like
if Enid were suddenly killed in an accident or died of some
chronic complaint. Reading had fertilized my imagination, and
in periods of daydreaming I even lived through the whole thing.

Someone would call the office asking me to come at once to
the hospital, giving me the news that my wife had suffered a bad
accident. And I would experience a sudden mixture of emotions
involving annoyance and some slight concern plus a secret re-
pressed hope that it might be fatal. And then I would go to the
hospital and find that she had been struck by a speeding car and
had died in the ambulance and they had not told me the whole
truth in order to soften the blow. I would pretend to be over-
come and to be taking it very well and people would say how
splendid I was, never breaking down. They would say, "It would
be better if he gave way. It will be all the harder for him later
on," and all the time the heart inside me would be like a stone
except for the small flicker of a flame, a flame which, if it could
speak, would say, "Now we are free! . . . Ronnie and Esther and I.
Now when the funeral is over we can go away and take the dog
with us. We'll stay away a long time and then sell the house and
get out of Oakdale for good. Well go off to Florida or buy a
ranch. We'll start out again some place where nobody will be
watching you from the window of the next house, where there is
air and space and there won't be a dance every Saturday night
at the country club where everybody goes and gets drunk
because there isn't anything else to do/'

I thought that somewhere, away from Oakdale, the children
might have a chance to be something more, to be perhaps like

[ 124 ]

Frank Saunders* family and the people I had seen there on the
one occasion I had ever strayed away from the reservation.

In all that daydreaming, I know now, it was not only Enid
from whom we escaped; it was also Oakdale, because the two
were inextricably associated and mixed together. Once or twice
when I had mentioned the possibility of moving away from Oak-
dale and indeed Crescent City itself, Enid had looked at me in
astonishment.

"What* s the matter with Oakdale and Crescent City?" she had
said. 'They're about as nice communities as it would be possible
to find anywhere in the world. Where else could you find so
many nice people all leading nice happy lives? Why should we
want to go somewhere and have to make friends all over again?
The children have roots here. So have both of us. The children
couldn't have a better future than in a place like this. Sometimes
I think you must be crazy. Certainly you get the craziest ideas
of any person I've ever known. What is it you want? What's
the matter with Oakdale? Most of the human race would be only
too delighted to be as well off as we are and live in as fine a
place as this.*'

"But. the children;* I had started to say once or twice. 'There's
so much more for them in life than . . /*

But I seldom got farther than hat She simply dismissed the
subject with a snort, adding, "I don't know what you're talking
about," which was true, God knows, and in all honesty I cannot
say that I knew myself what it was I wanted except that it
would be better and at least different.

In the daydreaming my mother would come on for the funeral
and we would both go through the mockery of grief and she
would take care of all the funeral arrangements, something which
she liked to do and at which she excelled, and there would be a
big funeral, and maybe when I returned from the cemetery and
was seated opposite her with the children at supper, our eyes
would meet and there would be a single glance in which every-
thing would be said, but even then she would be saying one
thing and I would be saying another.'

[125]

And beyond the funeral there were the days and weeks that
followed when, in the daydream, the children and I packed up
and went away looking for the place I had in mind. It was a
vague place, but there was sunlight and there was the sea and
the children ran around dressed in rough clothing and sometimes
we went fishing and at night we came back to a house that was
little more than a shack where inside things were comfortable
and untidy with a big fire burning that was not lighted by a
jet of gas which sometimes burned on and on while the bought,
neatly cut logs refused to take fire. And the ashes would be
allowed to sift out onto the floor instead of always being swept
up neatly every half hour or so. And the logs would be drift-
wood and you could put your cigarette ashes anywhere at all.
And Sandy 3 the setter, would sleep comfortably on the best chair.
And we'd cook our own supper and wash up the dishes afterward
and cook on a real fire instead of the electric rings of a shining
enameled white stove. And presently the kids would go to bed
because the day had tired them out and they wanted to go to
sleep and not because they had to be sent away at a fixed hour
whining for the last trashy radio serial.

But most of all Enid would not be there at all and the tele-
phone wouldn't ring and a neighbor's voice say, 'What are you
doing? Come on over and play some bridge," or "Let's go out
to the club for a few drinks." And in the daydreaming there
were always a lot of vague people about, as faceless as the dream
was vague and confused. They were salty characters and knew
about fishing and trapping and hunting and woke every morning
with excitement in their blood because it was a new day. And
we'd raise our own food and have some animals like cows and
pigs around and faceless people would come to stay with us out
of another world, people who could really talk and had ideas
and even the children would listen to them fascinated.

And always in the daydreaming there would come that day
when somewhere, perhaps on the beach among the dunes, I
would come across a woman and we would speak to each other
and then I'd discover that she lived somewhere near by and IM

[ 126 ]

go to help her repair something or other and presently we'd be-
come friends and then more than friends so that I couldn't
sleep for thinking of her, not only because she was desirable,
but because we understood each other in a thousand small ways,
so that we conversed without the need of talk, and when at last
I took her in my arms a kind of flame would envelop us so
that there were no longer two beings, separated and querulous,
but only one. And afterward we would run into the sea together
laughing and . . . and . . . we would be ... I would search for the
word, but the only word I could find was "happy" and that was
not adequate. No word, I think, is adequate for the thing of
which I dreamed. Those who have attained it, those few, know
that there is no word.

All this, of course, began as daydreaming with the supposed
accident in the street, and then week after week and month
after month the daydream presently passed into something else.
In moments of reality I knew that I was approaching forty, that
I was old enough by this time to have sense (which I still do
not have) but that I was still young enough to make a warm and
satisfactory husband or lover. The dream was all very well, but
I couldn't delay forever waiting for Enid to be hit by an auto-
mobile while I grew older and more cynical and despairing. And
one morning the idea came to me that I might hurry things up
by actually bringing about the "accident** myself before it was
too late.

At first I thought of the whole thing in terms of an accident
and worked out ways in which we might have an "accident'*
in which Enid was killed and I survived. There were mountains
not far from Crescent City with roads cut into the steeper sides
of the hills. The car might go over or I might be standing outside
the car when mysteriously it started moving and plunged over
the side with Enid in it. Or I might shove her of! the peak at
Lookout Point. Oh, I thought of a hundred "accidents," but
always there was something wrong with them. She might not
be killed and would live and "know," or I might be killed with
her or be maimed so that the daydream could never be realized.

[ 127]

So in the end I thought of poison and I went further into all
sorts of complicated plans, but always there seemed to be some-
thing wrong with them. This or that might go wrong and I
would be found out. One after another I rejected the plans until
I came to the one that concerned the sleeping pills. This seemed
to me to be the perfect crime.

Enid sometimes took capsules of stuff to make her sleep, I do
not know what they were, but the mere fact of her taking them
indicated that she too was unhappy, perhaps in her heart as
wretched as I was, although she would never admit it, least of all
to herself. She would push the thought away from her and blame
other things for her sleeplessness and her "nerves/* She was the
kind of woman who was ^determined to make a go of it" and by
now the whole performance had become so dominant that she
herself had become the character she was forever acting. She had
imprisoned herself in a net from which she could not escape.
She was caught in a web of illusion and self-deception and
dishonesty from which she could not free herself.

You might ask, "Why did you not get a divorce? Why didn't
you just run away and never come back?** But if you have ever
been in such a situation you would know that it is not as simple
as that. Many people have been in such a situation and they will
understand. For everyone who has run away there are a hundred
who stayed behind and stuck it out until at last, through drinking
or mere calloused dullness or simply age and weariness, it did
not matter any longer. It was not merely that I was tired of
Enid and that whatever pleasure there had been in our marriage
was done with. . . . That often happens to married people and
they find ways of going their own ways while still remaining to-
gether and manage to lead fairly civilized and decent lives as
individuals. That kind of thing could never happen with Enid
or many female monsters like her.

Enid would never give me a divorce and there could be no
possible grounds on which I could divorce her since, if the matter
ever came into court, she would merely appear there as the per-
fect wife and mother who lived only for husband and children.

[128 ]

There was no possibility whatever of her falling in love with
another man and wanting her freedom to marry him. All that
was outside the picture of Oakdale and the picture she had
created. I might have beat and kicked her save that the means
was not in my nature and to attempt it halfheartedly would
only have ended in deeper and more dismal confusion and
failure. I might have said more cruel things than I did say
many times and have killed her *love," but the catch there was
that she had and has no love to kill. It is something else that
held her to me ... and if I ever return it will still hold her to
me to the very end when it will become a bitter contest between
us to see who dies first.

And there were the children. Sometimes they seemed very
remote to me, as if they were strangers, and sometimes they
were very close and I was sorry for them and afraid. I suppose
it will be all right if they never Ttnow," if they just go on being
like the others in Oakdale. They will never be happy or unhappy.
They will never know any depths or any heights. And presently
as they grow up and marry . . . There is always a chance that
something may happen to awaken them and there is always a
chance that as they grow old enough to understand what I am
talking about I might be able to get through to them and make
things different and teach them the difference between automo-
biles and civilization, between plumbing and Me, between per-
verse prudery and morality so that they can live.

Here in the jungle I realize that up to now I have failed them
completely, for I have never tried to save them from the numb-
ness that will engulf them and has already begun to do so. I
have given them as yet nothing to live by, no dreams, no values,
no reality. They are moving about in a world of unreality, like
tropical fish in an aquarium from which they cannot escape,
with the water a proper temperature, fed every morning the right
amount and kind of fish food, with the proper amount of air
bubbling through the tepid water to keep it well aerated. And
there is a little porcelain castle in the tank which might be
labeled the Country Club in which the fish congregate, their

[ 129]

mouths opening and closing without end and without meaning.
I would like to free them from the aquarium but I don't know
how, and even if I found the way Enid would thrust them
quickly back again if it were possible.

I could have run away and made a clean getaway but I wasn't
that kind of man. I was not strong enough or reckless enough or
selfish enough or whatever you might call it, and in that I am
like a million other husbands and fathers. I am no Gauguin, nor
are most of the men I know, and the women are not female
Gauguins. If I had been, everything would have been changed
from the very beginning. I am, as you might say, "Mr. Smith"
or "Mr. Jones." The only difference is that I happened to look
in a mirror one morning while shaving and saw myself.

But to get back to the Perfect Crime. I worked it out in every
possible detail. I would go to New York and buy poison, per-
haps arsenic or strychnine, in a drug store in the heart of the
city on the pretext that I needed it to kill rats, and I would
never go into that neighborhood again as long as I lived so that
no one could possibly remember me. And when I came home I
would 11 some of the capsules with the poison and make small
scratches on the ones I had filled so that I could identify them
later. Then I would burn the paper in which the poison came and
then one night she would wake up in pain and by morning she
would be dead. Probably the doctors would diagnose the illness
as some sudden chronic organic failure, or if they had an autopsy
and discovered the poison, the discovery would lead nowhere.
There would be no trace. I would be shaken and bewildered
and overcome with grief. If there was an investigation the little
capsules with the scratches on them would not be found because
they had been removed and destroyed. Only the genuine
capsules would be left in the little box. The death would be a
complete and fathomless mystery. After all, were we not a model
husband and wife? Was not our family the perfect example of
a happy middle-class home? Were we not the "Family of the
Year"? There could be no motive. Even if the children were
questioned, they could not say that they had even seen a real
quarrel between their parents. They had never seen me strike

[ 130 ]

her. Enid did not believe in quarrels. As she put it, "My mother
always told me never to let the sun go down on a quarrel with
your husband."

If we ever had a disagreement or I spoke to her sarcastically,
she would come up behind my chair in the evening, put her
arms about my neck, and say, "It's all right, darling. I forgive
you." It was in such moments that I came nearest to translating
my plot into reality. It was in such moments that I did not even
consider the agonies of poisoning by strychnine.

But I never did and I never would act. Despite the fact that
in all the daydreaming I never felt the least remorse over having
killed her a hundred times, the act in reality was something else
again. Plenty of other husbands and plenty of wives have un-
doubtedly plotted as I plotted, but the number of those who have
ever acted is one in a hundred thousand. But there are the few
who have acted. Some have been discovered but some have
not been. There is a line between the daydreaming and the act,
the business of quietly putting out of existence another human
being. There is a line which, no matter how many have con-
sidered it, few have crossed. Those who have killed and been
discovered have usually done so carelessly and recklessly, in
passion or when tihey reached that point where things became
beyond endurance and temporarily the killer became mad.

The puzzling thing is why people find themselves caught in
such a web and why they do not tear it apart and escape. I
cannot tell you why I did not smash everything and run off
except that it was not only Enid who was unendurable. It was the
whole of my life from the moment I rose in the morning and
went to the office until at last, almost painfully, I fell asleep.
In a sense I, with my weakness, was actually a part of the very
web which imprisoned me. And so are many of us who are
merely killing time until we die.

The odd thing was that I had only worked out the complete
details of the Perfect Crime at the very moment that we were
chosen as the "Family of the Year'* and my mother descended
upon us along with tihe photographers and the newspaperwomen.
It seemed to knock the idea out of my head for the moment,

[ 131 ]

and after that came the business of Mary Raeburn and in the
end the chance of escape for a time at least into the Army.
That was an easy way out and a conventional one in which I
would betray nothing but merely seem to have volunteered for
the good of my country. And so at last I have ended up in the
desolate extravagant empty beauty of this island, alone but for
four men in whom I have little interest and almost nothing in
common, save that all of us are, men.

Vlll Jhe Jungle

IONIGHT rr WAS THE WOOL-HAT WHO INTERRUPTED MY
thoughts and writing. It was the first time he had ever come to my
hut and until now our relations had been what you might call
formal a casual greeting in passing and nothing else. Even then
the greeting on his side was sullen, as if somehow in the past I
had injured him in some way and the act had filled him with re-
sentment. I never questioned him about the sullenness but put it
down merely to his hatred of anything that was a little above
him or a little different from the world with which he was
familiar.

Tonight he came in, saluted, took off his hat, and stood in the
doorway.

Looking up I said, "Yes, Homer/' (It seemed silly to address
the men as "Private." Only the Sergeant did I ever address by his
title, and his bearing and professionalism demanded it.)

"Can I speak to you, mister?"

"Certainly. Sit down."

He sat down on the edge of my Army cpt and for a moment,
remembering the yaws and the native women he frequented in
spite of all controls, I felt a sudden tinge of squeamishness.

He did not speak and I said, "What is it?"

He twisted his hat for a moment. "It's about the Sergeant,"
he said. "He's always pickin* on me."

[ 132 ]

"How?" I asked.

He twisted his hat some more as if all conversation except
when he was talking about "nigger hunts" and life back home
was difficult or impossible.

He said, "Well, I get the blame for everything. Now he comes
and tells me I musta been stealin' stuff out of the hut."

"I talked to him last night and he says he doesn't believe you
took the stuff." I started to tell him the Sergeant's theory about
the Japs and thought better of it. Probably the Sergeant hadn't
told him, and if I even hinted there might be Japs in the bushes,
he wouldn't be any good at all as a guard. He'd just hide
away.

'Well, I know he does," said Homer stubbornly. "Even if a
storm blows down the radio antenny, he says it's my fault." A
look almost of anguish but with a touch too of murderous
vengeance came into his face. "And he's always hittin' me."

"Does he ever really beat you up?"

Homer considered for a moment. "Well ... I guess no ...
but he's always punching me in the muscles and afterward it's
sore," He put one hand up to the muscles of his shoulders and
rubbed the spot tentatively. "Sometimes it ain't good for a man's
dignity."

I wondered where he had come across the word "dignity" and
passed over it.

"Ill speak to the Sergeant about it," I said. And then un-
accountably I felt a wave of sympathy for him. I said, "How'd
you like a drink of real liquor?"

His face brightened. "I'd like it, mister. I ain't used to all
this beer. I can drink it and drink it and I only bloat up and
feel worse. All I get out of it is a lot of wind. Sometimes I feel
like I'd cut off my right leg for one swig of good corn likker."

I got up and poured him a drink out of the bottle of Scotch.
He tossed it off in a single gulp without a grimace or a cough.
I suppose that after his long experience with the corn likker,
mere Scotch seemed like soothing syrup.

"How are things getting on otherwise?" I asked.

[ 133 ]

"I want to get out of here and get home. I ain't got anybody
to talk to here. I ain't used to bein' in places where niggers and
kikes and Catholics is treated better than other folks. Seems like
I cain't find anybody to talk to." He looked down at his hat again.
"And that goddamn Sergeant. Him pickin' on me. If it was back
home he'd get run right outa town like we do down there with
all them papists and union organizers."

"Do you go to church?" I asked.

He looked at me. "You mean when I'm home?"

"Yes."

He nodded.

'What church?"

'The only church they is primitive Baptists."

There was a look of oppressive bewilderment on the lean
face with its freckles and big splay mouth.

'1 wanta go home," he repeated, "where a fella can be some-
body. I git tired of always bein* treated no better'n a houn*
dog."

It occurred to me that any attempts at conversation weren't
going to get anywhere. I thought, "Maybe if he gets a little
drunk heTl go to sleep and dream he's back home again and it'll
make him ha^ppy for a little time." I said, "What about another
drink?" and then cautiously added, "This is kind of a special
occasion the first time you've ever paid me a visit,"

"Sure," he said. "It makes me feel good."

So I gave him another shot of Scotch. He downed it and
shook his head. "That Al," he said. "He's teacher's pet. They
ain't nothin' too good for him. You know what he says the other
night. He says, 'Niggers is just as good as anybody else/ He ain't
had to live around niggers. Never saw one till he was twelve
years old. Seems they don't have *em up in his part of the
country." The whisky appeared to have reached home and he be-
came almost talkative. "And now you know what, mister? The
Sergeant has asked that kid Al to move his sleepin' cot right
into his own office."

"It doesn't make much difference, does it? Sergeant's quarters

[ 134 ]

aren't any different from the rest of you fellows. They aren't
much different from this." I gestured to include my own room
which certainly wasn't much of a place. "I suppose the Ser-
geant wanted company/*

"It's just favoritism, that's what it is/*

"What did Meyer think ahout it?"

Homer spat on the floor. Maybe it was the whisky that set
him back to primitive habits. "How do I know what that sonofa-
bitch kike thinks about anything? He don't talk. It's like I ain't
good enough to speak to."

"He doesn't talk much to anybody/'

"Well, he ain't said anything . . . but it don't look right/'

He picked up his glass as if to hint for another drink but I
didn't respond. I'd never seen Homer drunk. As he said, beer
didn't seem to have any effect on him. Like all the boys he could
drink can after can of beer and just sweat it out, but whisky was
different. Drunk, you probably couldn't tell what he'd do. Then
something occurred to me and I asked, "Who's on night guard
duty?"

"Me," he said.

"What time do you go on?"

"Oh, any time now/*

I stood up and said, "Well, any time you have a complaint,
Homer, feel free to come in and talk to me. I don't think it's
very serious about the Sergeant taking Al in with him. Maybe it's
a good idea."

He took the hint and stood up and at the same time he gave me
a curious look. I can only describe it by saying that the pale
blue eyes looked suddenly like the eyes of a turtle. It was a cold
dead look but venomous. I think it was the first time he had
ever really looked me in the eyes. He said, "Mebbe . . . only if
that sonofabitch don't keep his hands off me I might use a gun
on him."

At that I stiffened a little. "I don't want any of that kind of talk,
Homer, out of you or any of the boys. If you get fresh with a
gun you might end up in jail for the rest of your life/'

[135]

He looked away sullenly. "It wouldn't be a hell of a lot different
from bein* here. I might find somebody I could talk to in jail/'

I held open the door for him. "Get such ideas out of your head.
You'd better go now and get ready to go on duty before you get
into trouble again. I'll speak to the Sergeant tomorrow but I
guess it's not all one-sided. You can do your part too. Keep your
quarters in order and be on time and don't answer back. Good
night. Feel free to complain.''

I gave him a pat on the back but in return I did not even get
so much as a "Good night." He merely walked off toward the
huts that stood in a dark row against the thick wall of the jungle.

As soon as he had gone I knew I had done the wrong thing. I
shouldn't have offered him the drinks even out here in this
damned choked dripping wilderness where the five of us had to
get on together or at least to be as friendly as possible. I hadn't
made things any better. I hadn't softened him. I hadn't roused
any feeling of co-operation or any sense of friendliness. He had
taken the drinks and merely decided that I was a damned fool.
He hated me because I didn't feel as he did about Negroes and
Catholics and Jews. He probably thought that because I wasn't
a primitive Baptist I was just as bad as the others. What did you
do about somebody like that? What could you do to help him?

I believed now what the Sergeant said that Homer's only idea
was to get out of a task, to put something over on you. If he suc-
ceeded he felt good all over, and if you caught him out at it he
hated you with a resentment that grew more and more cancerous.
If you tried to treat him decently and give him a break he merely
thought you were a damned fool.

For a long time I sat thinking about him, unable to get back to
my writing. He was, I suppose, the "underprivileged," and nature
had made no provision for his redemption. Possibly far back, a
dozen or fifteen generations ago, an ancestor or two had been
convicts shipped out to Georgia as exiles, and presently other
ancestors had taken to the hill country to live in miserable poverty
with their only pleasures, fornicating, corn likker, shoutin* and
rollin* and an occasional "nigger hunt." They never owned any

[ 136]

slaves. They just hated the Negro, perhaps because somehow, in
spite of a poverty and ignorance as abject as their own, the Negro
had a better life because he ate better and had more fun out of
the whole sorry thing. There wasn't any reason for Homer's folks
to think themselves better than their Negro neighbors, except a
fancied reason that had no logic in it that their skins were white
instead of black, and that was only an accident. I wondered how
many of them there were like Homer, whether all the community
in which he lived back there was a community merely of Homers.

He was "underprivileged" all right, but what did you do about
him and all his kind? I doubted that anything could be done
about Homer, and I doubted that anything could be done about
his wretched offspring unless they were taken away from Homer
and his folks altogether. What did you do about someone who
could not be brought out of his own particular wilderness into the
world, because the world instinctively looked upon him with
loathing and contempt? How else could you look on somebody
like Homer?

It occurred to me that it was the tendency of our times to label
and pigeonhole everything, people most of all. Perhaps it was a
mixture of sentimentality and of the bureaucratic mind which
likes to have its statistics straight and everything adding up to
two times two. But Underprivileged'' was a silly convenient term
for the sloppy thinkers and the demagogic politicians. If they
meant the simple or the humble as Christ used those words, they
had some meaning, for humbleness and simplicity are virtues and
not economic labels. Homer certainly fitted neither the category
of the humble nor the simple. There must certainly be some good
in every man, but neither the Sergeant nor myself had ever been
able to find any good in Homer, try as we would from the be-
ginning. He wasn't the only such specimen I had encountered in
the Army, but he was probably the worst. He was the sort the
reformers proposed to "level up" while they leveled down the
intelligent, the able, the virtuous to his level, all, of course, in
terms of economics.

I thought, 'let them try to level Homer upward. All
[ 137 ]

he wants is his gun, a houn' dog, some corn likker, fornication,
and an occasional 'nigger hunt/ Let them give him the vote to
be exercised for the first cheap politician who comes along and
talks down to his level of lynchings and ignorance and insane
religion and prejudice. Let them try to level up Homer . . . and
see how far they get/*

Homer didn't want to be leveled unless it was in terms of
cash given to him without the demand for anything in return.
He just wanted to be let alone. How did you expect to get any-
thing out of the dark, inbred, suppressed ancestry which had
produced him. Sure, he'd be great in a mob, great in a revolution,
for he'd be free to express the only talent he had for bullying
and tearing down and destroying everything, for murdering and
torturing and burning anybody who was a little more intelligent
or a grain kindlier or more human than himself. Underprivileged,
hell!

I went back to writing, and presently the distant racket of the
Sergeant's radio was shut off and there were only the sounds of
the night and the jungle which had an extraordinary variety and
often resembled human sounds although you knew there was no
one there. It was as if spirits returned to haunt the night. It
showered now and then, and presently I no longer heard even
the sounds of the jungle and felt sleepy, and as I was undressing
slowly, the noisy wet stillness was shattered by a shot and then
another and another in rapid succession until several had been
fired.

I thought first of the Sergeant's theory of the stray Japs and
pulled on my pants and picked up my service revolver and an
electric torch. The sound came from the direction of the huts
and I made my way through the darkness toward them. There
was a light on in the Sergeant's quarters, and in the luminous
darkness outside I presently came upon his heavy figure, highly
visible because he was clad only in white shorts and singlet. He
carried an electric torch, flashing it spasmodically so as not to
provide a fixed aim for any attacker. Quickly I caught up with
him, calling out my name so that I might not get a pot shot in
my belly during the excitement.

[ 138 ]

"It's over here, I think!" lie said.

Then abruptly we came upon Homer in the darkness. He was
standing flattened out against the side of one o the Quonset
huts.

"What's up? 9> asked the Sergeant, and Homer said, "If s them
Japs. I seen 'em!"

"What Japs?" asked the Sergeant.

"Them Japs that's been stealin* the cans." Then from the sounds
I knew Homer was vomiting. Maybe it was the unaccustomed
whisky I had given him and maybe it was because he was plain
scared.

"Let's get out of here/' said Homer and turned on his electric
torch. The Sergeant grabbed it from him and said, "You damned
fool! D you want to get us all potted?" Then I said, "Better get
under cover some place until we can find out what happened."

I led the way back through the darkness to the Sergeant's
office. If it was only two or three Japs they were possibly un-
armed and probably wouldn't try to harm us unless we came on
them suddenly. If there were any Japs at all they simply wanted
to keep out of our way and scrounge what food they could find
even out of the garbage pit.

Once inside the hut we hung jackets over the two windows.
Homer was still retching and his freckled face was a gray-green
color. The Sergeant in his underwear looked like the bottom
man of a strong-act team. In a corner Al, the farm boy, was
pulling clothes onto his husky frame, with a curious dazed look
on his face as if he were not yet quite awake. For the sake of
space the two cots occupied by the Sergeant and Al had been
pushed near to each other and were covered by a single canopy
of mosquito netting.

The Sergeant said to Homer, "Now give us a line on what
happened. Pull yourself together and talk."

"What about Meyer?" I asked and the Sergeant turned to Al.
"Better go and bring him in here too. It looks like we've got
trouble on OUT hands."

With a certain amount of absurdity Al pulled a comb through
his tousled curly hair and then started off for the other hut. At

[ 139 ]

the same time Homer said, "I was patrollin' the huts and all at
once when I come round the corner of the hut that was broke
into I run onto a Jap, almost fell over him/'

"How'd you know he was a Jap? It might have been one of
them fuzzy-wuzzies."

Homer seemed to have lost some of his fear and the color
began to come back into his face. "I turned my flashlight on him
just as he was gittin' away into the brush. I seen he was a Jap."

"But how?" persisted the Sergeant

"I know the little sonsofbitches," said Homer. "I seen lots of
'em at Maloyka when they brung 'em as prisoners short bow-
legged yellow bastards. They ain't the same color and they ain't
built the same as the fuzzy-wuzzies. They got short thick legs
and the fuzzy-wuzzies is long and skinny."

The Sergeant looked at me. "Well, what are we gonna do?"
But before I could answer him he turned again to Homer. "When
you shot did you hit him?"

'1 kinda think I did," said Homer. "]ust as he hit the brush
he let out a yell and jumped into the air. It was just like hittin*
a rabbit"

Then Al returned bringing Meyer with him. The dark little
fellow hadn't even wakened up and he said nothing now. He
just came in and stood there watching us with his great dark
beautiful eyes. It was a funny assembly.

The Sergeant turned to Homer. "You'd better go back out there
and go on watching. There ain't any use in letting 'em come up
and plump grenades in the window."

At first Homer didn't answer, but the lower lip of the big
loose mouth was thrust out suddenly. Then he said, "I ain't
agoin' outside just to be a pot shot for no goddamn Jap."

The Sergeant moved instinctively toward him to give him a
good going-over. I said, "Wait a minute. Better all three of you
go out you and Al and Meyer. You can make up sleep tomorrow.
The Sergeant and I will have to work out some strategy." I
turned to the two others. "Go ahead, boys. Keep your eyes open.
Don't get between the bushes and the sky and don't use your

[ 140 ]

torches unless you want to get a shot . . . and don't shoot each
other."

"It's only fair," said Homer.

Al and Meyer were both awake now and you could see that
both of them kind of liked the excitement, what with nothing
going on for so long. Al picked up his Tommy gun and slung
it on. Then the three of them went out.

When they had gone the Sergeant turned and said, "What
d'you think of that damned wool-hat sonofabitch?"

I grinned. "What did you expect?"

"Not very damned much."

"Maybe there was only one Jap and maybe Homer hit him."

"It ain't likely either way," said the Sergeant. "What are we
gonna do now?"

He sat down on a packing case, and I said, "I guess well just
have to keep our eyes open and work out some plan of doubled
guard duty."

"With only three of them," he said, "it ain't goin' to be easy.
I'll take over myself for three or four nights anyway. We sure
can't run the Japs outa that jungle. A whole division couldn't
do it"

Then we were silent for a time and a brilliant idea came to me.
"Tell you what we could do, Sergeant We could feed them."

"What d'you mean . . . feed 'em?"

"We could leave out some food every night for them to come
and get."

He looked at me with astonishment. "That wouldn't be Army
regulations feedin* the enemy. No, that wouldn't be accordin'
to regulations."

I grinned. 'What the hell? Which do you prefer f eeding them
or letting them blow us all up and kill us off one by one like
/sitting ducks. We could put out so many cans of stuff every
night where they'd find it. Just let *em come and get it. Maybe
they haven't got any guns. If they swam over here the chances
are they're unarmed. But maybe they have. And a starving man

[ 141]

is likely to kill anybody, Feed *em and probably they'll let us
alone,"

"Unless they're nuts like a lot of *em are. You know . . . what
they call fanatic . . . them Banzai charges/*

"That could be."

"And what about the reports and if they come to check up on
the stores?"

"Nobody's going to check up. They've damned near forgotten
us already, and if they do come to get us the order will be to
destroy all the supplies. We might just as well buy protection
for ourselves."

The Sergeant scratched his bristly head. "Somehow it don't
seem right givin' aid and comfort to the enemy."

"Well," I said, "thafs what we're going to do, I haven't got
any intention* of getting myself or any of you guys killed ' just
because it's against Army regulations to feed a few godforsaken
starving Japs. We'll just see how it works anyway. Maybe they'll
even come in and surrender and then they can do the washing
and kitchen police."

At this the troubled look went off the Sergeant's big red face.
He even grinned. "YouVe got something there. Could be."

"Tell you what/' I said. "Tomorrow have the boys rake the
sand all smooth for about ten feet out from the huts and tell
them to keep off it. Then if we get any footprints well know
whether they're Japs or not Maybe they're just fuzzy-wuzzies."

The idea appealed to his detective-story tastes. "That's great/'
he said. "That's great! Robinson Crusoe."

I turned to the door. "Ill go out and make the rounds now and
then go to bed. Better keep an eye on the boys till morning and
in a couple of nights I think we can get back to the one-man
guard. And tomorrow before dark put out a half-dozen cans of
feed . . . make it an assortment, you know beans, corn, and
soup. The more tasty you make it, the more they'll let us alone."

He was all for the idea now and grinning about it. "Better
put out a can opener too. The poor bastards probably have to
smash the cans to get 'em open."

[ 142]

I started for the door and the Sergeant said, "Jeez. You ought
to be a general."

"No," I said. "Diplomat is the word."

Outside it was raining again. I found the three soldiers to-
gether. Everything seemed to be quiet and I said to Homer, "I
want to speak to you for a minute. You other fellows go along
with your patrol."

The other two went off leaving Homer standing there. I could
not see him in the thick darkness but I knew how he looked,
the lower lip thrust out, the narrow face sullen and pinched.

"You know what you did, Homer?"

"No, what?"

"You refused to obey orders and you know what the penalty
is. You could be sent up for years or you might even be shot."

"To hell with that!" he said suddenly and with equal sudden-
ness I lost my temper. "So that's what you think," I said. "Now
I'm going to tell you something. If I wanted to I could shut you
up right now and put you on bread and water and keep you
there till somebody came along and picked you up and took
you back for trial. You're no damned good and you never have
been any good to anybody any place. You make trouble. You
won't work. You're a coward and a bully. In fact you're about
the worst sonofabitch IVe ever known. Have you got anything
to say for yourself?"

"I ain't gonna get killed savin' the rest of you. That's what
you'd all like to get me killed and out of the way. I'm always
gettin* the dirty work shoved off on me."

I could see it wasn't any good going on in that vein. It didn't
make any impression. I said, "I'm not going to put you under
arrest and I'm not going to send in any report. Now it's up to
you to behave yourself. I don't want any more trouble. Okay?"

Out of the darkness came the answer "Okay" but it was an
answer heavy with hate and resentment.

I waited till the watch came round again and Homer joined
them, and then went back toward my own hut. On the way I
passed the Sergeant dressed now, bustling, and on the job.

[ 143 ]

I said, "Everything seems to be quiet I think it'll be all right
now . . . especially if Homer did get that Jap."

"He never did/* said the Sergeant. "The truth ain't in Mm.
I he gets scared he'll just blast away at anything. Tm more
scared of bein' shot by him than I am of the Japs. Go on to bed,
Captain. Ill keep on the job."

Back in the hut I put out the light and undressed but I didn't
sleep. I kept thinking how easy it would be for a Jap to pitch a
grenade in the window. But it wasn't really that which kept me
awake. I kept thinking of other things . . . what a silly situation
this was five of us sitting out here guarding a lot of food that
nobody was ever going to use. And all around us were the half-
starved natives full of lice and disease living in a jungle so rich
and dense that you couldn't get through it without hacking your
way. And it grew right up again behind as you went through.
And crawling around in that jungle were Japs, maybe one,
maybe two, maybe a dozen starving to death in the midst of all
that rich rank vegetation and maybe plotting to clean us all
out, poor ignorant little bastards fighting to hang onto a life
which was hardly worth hanging onto. What were we all doing
here? What the hell was it all about?

At last I got up and hung a canvas over the door and a coat
over the window and went about writing down all this, and
suddenly it came over me that in essence and spirit the life
here wasn't much different from the life back in Oakdale. In
both places I had been marking time . , . until I began to write
all this. Probably nobody will read it. Probably in my heart I
never meant it to be read by anybody, but whatever happens I
am beginning to feel that I am really doing something for the
first time in my life, really doing something in which my mind
works and I can take satisfaction.

Note: There are more Japs around. In the morning the cans
of food were gone and on the clean-swept sands there were
naked footprints. They were not the prints of the long splay
feet of the fuzzy-wuzzies. They were those of unmistakably Jap
feet, short, thick, and flat and smaller than any of ours. The .poor

[144]

devils must really be starving to risk being shot at. Again, my
only fear is that trigger-happy Homer will shoot one of them or
even one of us.

fX Oakdale

I HE IiAST NIGHT OR TWO I HAVE BEEN BEADING OVER WHAT

I have written up to now and I felt a sudden profound wave of
discouragement and failure. I have been trying to set down every-
thing and I have failed. It all seems curiously unsatisfactory for
it seems to give the picture of a sullen, unpopular, morose in-
trovert, yet that is only a part of the whole picture. There was
another side, almost wholly contradictory, as if I were two per-
sons. The Greeks had a saying that every man is three persons
the person people thought he was, the person he thought he was,
and the person he really was. It seems to me that up to now I
have been writing only about the person I think I am and payiog
no attention to the person other people think I am. And I am
aware that somewhere along the line there must be a great differ-
ence, else the story would not be so complex and difficult. The
person I really am no one can describe except God, but certainly
it must be a very confused, changeable, and unstable creature
. . . which indeed is probably true of all of us.

Tonight I decided to attempt seeing myself as I must appear
to others, not only to the friends and the acquaintances back
in Oakdale, but to strangers I might meet on the street or on
a train. When I attempt it I begin to understand that a great
many of my troubles come from a divided personality, that even
many of the misconceptions shared by our friends concerning
Enid and me and our life together arise from that fact. People
have not seen the truth, not because they were unperceptive, but
because it was only possible to judge from appearances.

I wonder how many men and women suffer from the same
division of personality and the same outward deception. Perhaps

[145]

in my own way I have been as great a fraud as Enid. It occurs
to me that she is able to judge only from my outside personality
because she has never been allowed to see or to share what
might be called the inside personality which I seem to have been
writing about.

Let's pretend that you met me in the club car on a stream-
lined train. You would think me at once to be a prosperous, con-
servative., contented businessman on the verge of middle age.
What you would see would be a fairly good-looking fellow with
a little gray in his hair and a few lines on his face, with a healthy
skin, smooth-shaven with well-kept, rather beautiful hands
neither the hands of a working man nor the long thin hand of the
nervous, oversensitive type. You would see a man with a youth-
ful figure, thickening only a little around the middle, dressed in
a conservative plain or pin-striped blue suit. You would see a
man who did not wear hand-painted ties or any of the vulgar
imitations of them but a plain blue or maroon tie or one of
foulard with tiny figures on it. There would be an expensive
wrist watch and a clean good handkerchief tucked negligently
into the breast pocket. Very likely you would say, "There is a
successful and happy fellow, well adjusted, looking probably
younger than his years a fellow who has been to one of the
better colleges and already is on boards of directors and inter-
ested in the good of his community/*

You might make some remark about the train being late or
how badly things were going in Washington, and presently there
would be a conversation punctuated by a drink or two and one
or two stories, not the dirty bathroom jokes of the traveling sales-
man in the smoking room, but funny stories, a little strong but
with a point. And presently the talk might turn to families and
education and children, and the fellow (me) would tell you
about his own family. It would come out that he was happily
married and that his wife was very active in public affairs
without neglecting her household, that his two children (a boy
and a girl) were healthy and went to excellent schools. You
would find out that the fellow lived in a nice suburb called

[ 146]

Oakdale, and had a very prosperous insurance business which he
hoped his boy would take over a little later so that he could ease
off a bit and enjoy himself more. You would discover that the
fellow played golf in the eighties and raised roses for a hobby.
(That might be the only weak, betraying spot.) But when at
last the train arrived or one of you went to bed, you parted
thinking you had met a very fortunate and prosperous fellow.
You had exchanged addresses and promised to let each other
know if either of you ever visited the home town of the other.
You might even, in your pleasure at making a new friend, think,
"There's a sample of what America can produce. That's what
you might call the average middle-class American. No country
produces a finer product/*

Or at home in Oakdale you would find that the man known as
Wolcott Ferris living at 818 Bosquet Road was one of the finest
fellows you had ever met. He played a good game of golf. He
could drink with the best. He had plenty of brains and was a
good businessman. He had one of the soundest wives in the
community, good-looking and a good dresser and a good house-
keeper who was active in the P.T.A., the League of Woman
Voters, the Red Cross, and other social activities. He was a fellow
who was generous with his contributions and knew how to have
a good time when away with the boys at a convention nothing
priggish about him. And he Tiad class" that meaning the neat
well-cut clothes, the conservative ties, and the college education.
Lately he had become perhaps a little less convivial, drinking
less, going to the club less frequently, and sometimes absenting
himself from the usual businessmen's lunches on the excuse of
overwork. But there was nothing unusual about that. Anybody
growing older was likely to slow down a little. A smart business-
man too!

That I imagine is as I must seem to others, both strangers
and friends. I am not sure how much the division of personality
is my own doing and how much of it is the result of the pressures
of early background and the kind of world and community in
which I live. Certainly the division is a sharp one, painful at

[ 147 ]

times and not in any sense healthy. It is the kind of thing which
could lead to outright schizophrenia.

What satisfaction must be found in being a complete extrovert,
in bellowing and shouting and showing off, in playing the fool,
with never a thought of any depth, never a thought which could
bite and sear until at last the tissue built up by fearful and
cowardly men to conceal truth is burned or cut away and truth
lies naked, blinding and sometimes bitter but beautiful. Only
the strong can survive such a spectacle. Only the strong can
understand truth and perhaps, armed with it, defend himself
against the society in which he is forced to live and even to
strike back with blows which, accumulated, may some day liber-
ate all men, strong and weak alike.

Some extroverts, like the Sergeant, are simply born that way,
with a set of glands operating furiously so that a kind of fierce
physical activity leaves no time save for sleep which recharges
the glands so that in the morning light they begin to operate
furiously all over again. These are driven men and women, per-
haps superficially happier than others but perpetually ignorant
of any subtle or profound satisfaction. They are the clowns, the
boisterous, whose emptiness echoes and re-echoes with a boom-
ing sound through a hollow cavern. And they contribute nothing.
They bring nothing into the world. And they take nothing from
it in experience. They are, I suppose, happy. They can suffer,
but it is only a physical suffering like that of the Sergeant de-
prived for a long period not of the love of one woman but of the
mechanical sensual satisfaction of women who become in time
a kind of mechanical apparatus like that used in the artificial
insemination of cattle.

And there are others, extroverts of a different sort, who be-
come so out of fear and cowardice, who will not be alone out of
terror of the thoughts that constantly creep up behind them and
threaten them the ones who spend all their lives in turning
away, in deceiving themselves. What happens to them in the
still of the night when they waken and are alone? What happens

. [ 148 ]

must be horrible, so horrible that they remain incapable of ever
revealing the experience.

It seems to me that the sickness of our society is that it has
become a society either of stupid or of contrived and cowardly
extrovert individuals who frequent the clubs, the pool parlors,
the whorehouses, the night clubs, or the bars out of sheer terror.
They give themselves over to talking pictures, to radio, to tele-
vision, to comics, to sports because, inherently and instinctively,
they are afraid. Of what?

One might try to take one of the polls which are an evil
symptom of our times, but the pollster would not get one honest
answer because an honest answer would be a shamed answer and
because so many would not even know why they are afraid. It
is a fear much worse and more desperate than the terror of war-
fare by disease or of great bombs that destroy whole cities. Those
are merely physical fears and do not particularly terrify any
healthy or decent person. But the fears which drive us to live
in crowds, to pursue amusements and diversions beyond the
ultimate limits of boredom, to contrive drinking parties and
clubs and organizations and meetings in order not to be alone,
not to think, and never to see ourselves, are fears infinitely worse.
They possess at once the hair-raising nameless terror of ghosts
and the ultimate terror of utter emptiness, which Poe might well
have dissected. And so the victims mark time in a limbo of
agitation, swirling round and round, until at last death releases
them from the necessity of ever having a thought and from the
perpetual flight from the pitiable spectacle of their own empti-
ness.

Such an extrovert society can create a great furor and hubbub;
it can raise great anthills with the deadening and uninspired
muddy efficiency and mediocrity of the Socialist; it can even amass
and expand and devalue money in its self-deception, but it will
never contribute much to civilization and in the end can create
only a society of morons who work for themselves and others,
like the workers of a hive, merely to keep alive without ever know-
ing quite why they are working or why they want to live at all,

[ 149 ]

All this creates more and more a society and a race of men
who live only by some cosmic force which compels them to go
on living and working, without plan, without ambition, without
vision, without any of those gifts or potentialities which slowly,
over millions of years, have raised man above the level of animals.
Could it be that we are slipping backward while we seem to be
surging forward? Could it be that all the things science has dis-
covered to keep alive those who should have died are merely the
cynical manifestation of wise and all-knowing God and nature
slapping down the pretensions of insignificant and pompous little
man, permitting him to destroy not only his "civilization" but
eventually himself? Are we not, by emphasis on all material
things, upon "security," upon the leveling upward and down-
ward of all men to a single plane of mediocrity, merely destroy-
ing that element, that core, which has since the beginning lifted
civilized man slowly and painfully upward from the level of
barbarism?

An extrovert society which works only for material rewards
and spends all its time at the games in the arena and whose only
goal is a leveled mediocrity is a doomed society.

Perhaps all of us are in one degree or another schizophrenics.
Only the simplest and most primitive of men living in a simple
tribal community with a minumum of taboos escapes those pres-
sures which split and divide us, which force us into suppressions
and hypocrisies and snobberies and pretense. Sometimes sitting
in the bar at the country club I have slipped out of the general
conversation for a moment and across my glass have watched
men whom I knew well and yet did not know at all and have
wondered what was the other side of them. What was it they
did not tell? What was it they refused to face? What was it,
besides age and too many Bourbons, that brought the tired harsh
lines into their middle-aged faces?

What would happen if I said suddenly to one of them, "Let' s
talk about ourselves. Let's abolish all rules and habits and just
dig down inside and spill everything!'*

If such a fantastic thing were possible. I know what would

[ 150 ]

Happen. There would be first a sudden astonished silence and
then a suspicious glance such as one might give suddenly to a
person who had been talking along normally and suddenly said,
"Go and report to Marechal Ney. I am Napoleon/* and then
probably an exclamation of astonishment, "What the hell are
you talking about?'*

It occurs to me that there has been in my existence only one
person who ever has seen the other, inward side of me and that
was Mary Raeburn. She is probably the only one living to whom
I have ever talked about myself. She might have saved me, but
in the end she only brought disaster.

In order to understand many things it is necessary to go into
Mary's background which wasn't at all the ordinary one. Indeed
it was rather exceptional and even peculiar. Mary was the
granddaughter of one of the first men to see the great possibili-
ties of a place like Crescent City in the midst of a wild country
that was rapidly being tamed. He spent all of his time trying to
build up the community and in the process acquired a great deal
of land in what is now the heart of a big industrial city. His own
efforts and the efforts of other people in time brought an im-
mense value to this land so that by the time he died he was many
times a millionaire.

He left a rather fantastic will leaving all of the fortune to an
only son but with every kind of restriction. The land was never
to be sold until the third generation, which was as far ahead as
he was able to tie up the fortune. He had never sold any land
himself; he had only acquired more and more, and he did not
want the fortune squandered or broken up. The whole of the
properties were run in a kind of corporation with a board oJ;
directors which included his own son, whose judgment he ap-
parently did not hold in great esteem. Already before he died he
had seen fortunes made in the new country squandered and he
had seen the inheritors leave Crescent City and go to live in
New York or in Europe, drawing their incomes from Crescent
City and spending them elsewhere. So he made another provision
that the inheritors through the second generation could not

[ 151]

have the income unless they spent at least six months of every
year in residence in Crescent City itself. That is how Mary
Eaeburn came to spend part of each year there.

The old man's distrust of the ability and interests of his only
child, a son, may have been well founded for the son showed no
interest whatever in business. With the passion of the pioneer's
determination that his children should be well educated, the old
man sent his son East to school and there something happened to
him. After four years in Harvard and three summers in Europe,
the son, who was Mary's father, returned a stranger to Crescent
City, and when the old man died the son no longer made any
effort to conceal his preference for the East and for Europe. He
married a rather colorless New England woman, and from then
on Europe was their home. They only came to Crescent City for
the period necessary to keep the big income which increased
every year, and even while they were residing officially in
Crescent City they spent most of the six-month period traveling
within the borders of the United States or visiting rich and some-
what fashionable friends in the East and the South.

Mary was born about three years after me in Europe. I never
saw much of her until about a year before I came out here to
this South Pacific island and I never really knew her until then.
The society of a place like Crescent City is more complex than
appears on the surface. Those of us who lived in Oakdale and
belong to the country-club set appeared to many people, es-
pecially those who lived in less rich suburbs, to be what might
be called Tiot stufP socially, yet there was a circle, very small
and very unstandardized, which occupied a situation still higher.

The people in this set existed a little apart not because they
were necessarily wealthier some of the Oakdale families were
very rich indeed but because of something almost intangible
which it was difficult to explain. They knew more and they took
an interest in a great many things which were ignored or went
unheeded and even unheard of in our Oakdale world. They did
not believe the world ended at the borders of Oakdale or even
Crescent City or even of the state itself. Whether they traveled

[ 152 ]

or stayed at home* they lived everywhere. Some of them in-
cluded businessmen important enough to be a part of the society
of the whole nation, who came and went, with interests in Texas
or California or South Carolina or where you will. None of them
might have been called "Mr. Smith" or "Mr. Jones." Most of
them were nice and kindly people, frequently very friendly and
generous, but all of them were busy people. A few of them were
almost like Frank Saunders* family. They were not snobbish.
If they appeared infrequently at the country club or rarely
played golf and seldom gave cocktail parties, it was only because
they were too busy . . . busy with what? That too is difficult to
answer.

There was old Mrs. Sidell who would rather sit at home in one
of the finest of gardens and work on her needlepoint while she
talked endlessly about things which Enid, even with her college
education, would never have understood. Mrs. SidelTs needle-
work was known to connoisseurs all over the states and all over
the world. When she died most of what she had done would be-
come museum material, for they were real works of art. She
was a great lady, simple, kindly, and warm. There was Tom
Worthington, one of the world's greatest chemists, and Alice
Mackaye who had been a very fine actress and finally came back
to live on a big farm with her sister and her sister's family. Her
sister was a great horse and cattle breeder. And the Birdwells.
Harry Birdwell had a share in a family factory in which he took
some interest, but most of his time was spent with his wife in
research concerning the lesser-known Elizabethan poets. Scholars
in every part of the world knew them both and what they had
accomplished and sometimes came to Crescent City to see the
books and papers he had collected. And there was Ernest Lawton,
as fine a lawyer as you could find anywhere.

These people did not live together in a small community like
our own. They lived where they chose in Crescent City and they
stayed in Crescent City because that is where their roots were
and because they liked it Alice Mackaye and her sister on a
big farm, the Birdwells in a rather gloomy big house in the

[153]

center of town on a street which had long since gone to filling
stations and faith-healer's offices and the churches of hysterical
splinter religious sects. Tom Worthington and his wife lived in
an apartment near the center of town.

There were many others who **belonged" to no set yet among
themselves lived in a separate world. They were scattered and
saw each other infrequently yet there was a surprising intimacy
among them. None of them was perhaps busier than most of us
in Oakdale, but their business had a purpose, a design, and a
fire. They were not busy merely killing time. There was no "club-
biness," no groups and cliques who saw each other seven days a
week. They were all about us and yet in no way a part of us. It
was as if each one lived in a world of his own which was in some
way related to all the other worlds. But all of us in Enid's circle
were excluded from all those worlds.

It was among these people that Mary Raeburn belonged and
among them that she had lived during all of the years in which
she spent part of her time in Crescent City.

While we were growing up and until after Enid and I were
married, Mary sometimes came to the parties when in Crescent
City where the young people met, but she always seemed a little
apart, which was possibly only natural since she did not spend
enough time among us to know all the gossip and indulge in the
somewhat feeble talk and giggling that passed among the girls
of our world for conversation. I know that one year she went
for a time to the Oakdale High School (it was new then and the
teaching good and the children of all the better families went
there without any thought of boarding school), but she did not
have a happy time since she was always an outsider and "differ-
ent." Her parents never attempted the experiment again after
that first year.

She was never the flashy sort of girl that the boys ran after.
At that time she was rather plain and too plump. Like many such
girls, as she grew older and fined down a bit, her figure improved
and the fine bone structure in her face became evident and she
acquired a look of distinction that at times approached actual

[ 154]

beauty. After the time she was twenty-two or -three we rarely
saw her. Now and then she appeared at the country club to
play golf with someone who was visiting her, or we encountered
her at a charity ball or some other more or less public function.
She was always pleasant and agreeable, but somehow she didn't
fit in with the women of Enid's set, I think because neither side
could find anything to talk about.

When she was twenty-two or -three her father died and Mary
came into an immense income, predicated always upon the condi-
tion that she spend so much of every year in Crescent City. A
year or two later she married a man from the East called Herbert
Raeburn. I saw him once or twice and he seemed to be all right,
dark, older than Mary, and rather handsome. But something went
wrong with the marriage and after four years they were divorced.
After that her contacts with the people of Oakdale and most of
those in Crescent City became even more tenuous and broken.
There were always visitors at her big strange house, but we
rarely saw them, and she spent a good deal of time on week
ends in the Kentucky horse country and, after planes came in,
even as far away as Virginia.

The house in which she lived had been built in the Eighties
by her grandfather and by the standards of a generation or two
later it was considered ugly, although by now it has acquired a
certain antique beauty which was always there unnoticed in
the scale and proportion of the porches, the windows, and the
doorways. It was built in the period when iron dogs and stags
were familiar ornaments on the huge lawns beneath great elms
and maples. The porches were enormous and wide and very
high, with complicated columns supporting the roofs, and at one
side there was a kind of tower, square in shape, with a magnifi-
cent view over the whole of the great river valley. Inside there
was a huge hallway with a wide winding stairway. The ceilings
were high, perhaps as high as fifteen feet, with windows on the
ground floor, running from floor to ceiling, which opened out-
ward onto the porches or directly into the garden. Behind the
house there were big stables and a great carriage barn where the

[ 155 ]

dogcarts and phaetons and victorias of the grandfather's time
are still preserved.

There was a curious sadness about the house as if it had been
built for a great family with children running about. But in two
generations there were only two children to grow up in the big
house Mary's father and then Mary herself. It was certainly in
our time a very expensive house to run. Heating it alone must
have cost a small fortune, and there was the endless problem
of cleaning it and keeping it in repair. People were always say-
ing they could not see why Mary spent so much money and took
so much trouble to keep up such a vast old-fashioned house when
she could have lived so much more pleasantly in a smaller more
convenient one. But Mary had plenty of money no one but the
trustees ever really knew how much, and until the times of huge
taxes it is likely that she could not possibly spend her income and
the money continued to pile up. Still, even money could not make
the problems of servants and cleaning and repairs anything less
than a trouble and a worry.

My grandfather, the German ironmonger, and Mary's father
had been friends and they were both fond of music, and while
my grandfather was still alive I went there a few times with him
after supper in the evening. Usually I ran about the stables where
there were five or six colored men in charge of the horses and
carriages, but I did come to know as well the inside of the house.

It was what might have been called "richly furnished'* with
heavy dark furniture and heavy curtains of brocade or velvet
running from floor to ceiling with carved and gilded baldachins
at the tops of the windows. There were splendid gilt console
tables with marble tops and huge fireplaces in which as a small
boy I could stand upright without touching my head. The stair
rail or banister of the great stairway was made of heavy dark
wood, very broad and very slippery, and one of my childhood
frustrations arose from the fact that there were no children there
to play with who might have slid down it and I never had
courage enough to attempt it on my own, Mary herself was
three years younger than I, and even when she was at home there

[ 156 ]

was no contact between us beyond a mere childish how-do-you-
do. At that age the fact that she was a girl kept us apart and
at that age three years* difference in age makes an enormous
obstacle even to communication. All I remember about her at that
period was that she seemed shy and fat and rather overdressed
and a little sad.

When my grandfather died I did not see the house again until
I was nearly twenty when twice during the summer of that
year Mary's mother made a rather listless effort to bring Mary
more closely together with the young people of Crescent City
and twice gave dinner parties which were much grander than
anything most of us had ever seen, with a real English butler
and two or three colored menservants wearing white cotton
gloves and with wonderful silver and crystal on the table. After
that summer the mother's health grew worse and she became
what was known in an earlier generation as an invalid. When
Mary was twenty-six, two years after the marriage which did not
last, she died.

I have put all this down because it helps to explain why Mary
and I did not get together when we were young. We might have
married each other then. On my side I might have rescued her
from the great sad house and the ailing mother and an unhappy
marriage and on her side she might have opened up for me a
world which she did open up many years later when we were
both on the edge of middle age. It didn't happen. To the young
men of Crescent City Mary seemed not to have much reality.
She was somewhat like an enchanted princess in a tower, isolated
not only by the different manners of a life she had known away
from Crescent City but by the concrete fact of her great fortune,
for everybody knew how rich she was and whenever any young
man showed her any attention it was whispered at once that he
was after her money.

I met her again at what for me was a dangerous time. I had
been reading and reading and in a vicarious way I had been
growing, as you might say, from the inside out, and the dreari-
ness of my life with IJnid had become very nearly insupportable

[157]

so insupportable that when I went to New Orleans along with
some of the men from Crescent City on a convention I flung my-
self into what might be described as debauchery out of sheer
despair.

Five of us went together. Their names are unimportant to all
of this and I would not want them hurt if ever what I am writing
came into the wrong hands. Let us call them Torn, Dick, Harry,
and Ernest. Tom was a prosperous manufacturer with a wife and
three children, about forty-five years old. Dick was a widower
of fifty-five, a businessman who was one of our best drinkers.
Harry held the agency for one of the most popular of automobiles
which was a gold mine. He and his wife had no children and led
a strange life of quarrels and reconciliations, now together, now
apart. Ernest was the most conventional of all a very respected
lawyer, conventionally and apparently happily married, the kind
of man who appears almost ascetic, handsome, grayish, and even
thin-lipped. All of them had worked hard for their money and
were still working hard, save in the rare times when they took a
few days off. Then they relaxed too violently, too desperately,
as if to make up for lost time. Although I had made many a
similar trip in similar company, I can remember very little con-
cerning them. But this trip still remains clear as a brilliant
photograph, perhaps because of Ernest's death and because it
marked the end of something in my Me.

The train had scarcely left the station when Ernest began
ordering old-fashioneds, and from then on the drinking rarely
stopped until the tragic end of the trip. We had several before
lunch and then ate a quick meal, and three of the five of us re-
tired to the bedrooms to sleep off the first fine flush of intoxica-
tion. It was not so much, I think, that they were actually in need
of sleep but that the drinking made it possible to sleep. It did
many things for them . . . and indeed for myself. , . . In the
haze of alcohol the world seemed brighter and the constant
small worries and unhappinesses and annoyance seemed to fade
out or to take on their proper scale of importance in the business
of living, becoming suddenly small and insignificant to the point

[ 158]

wliere presently they were forgotten altogether in a warm sense
of well-being which was physical as well as mental.

Ernest, who outwardly was the most respectable of us all, had
a bad heart a heart which at fifty-three was merely tired as
muscles become tired following some effort of immense and pro-
longed physical exertion. When he drank I think it actually im-
proved for the time being not only his sense of physical well-being
but released a brilliance and clarity of mind which always had
been there but which long ago had become obscured simply
through the weariness of the physical machine. Back in Crescent
City, in his office or at home or at the country club, one had at
times the impression of a man dragging his way along. At times
in the very midst of a conversation his eyes would close suddenly
and his thin nervous hand would go of itself to his forehead
and for a little while he would not be there at all. And one could
understand that He had worked very hard all his life with long
hours and the immense concentration and detail, which go into
the making of any brilliant, successful lawyer. And he had given
money and what was vastly more important, much of his time
and energy to the good works of the community. He was cer-
tainly a scholar and a gentleman, but there were times when, I
think, he actually thirsted, with some of the agonies, almost
physical, which accompany the slow persistent misery of thirst,
for earthiness, for low and common things. In short there were
times when, in order to restore himself, there came over him a
physical urge to wallow, to debase himself and his somewhat
ascetic ideals, to get back to earth, the earth from which all of
us come and to which all of us return. In this it might be said
that he resembled many a saint in ecclesiastical history.

Outwardly at least his marriage was a happy one, although his
wife always seemed a bit rarefied for my taste. She was the
daughter of a bishop of the Episcopal church, and there was
an air of delicacy, even of fragility, about her, as if she had
grown up in the rather damp stained-glass dusk of an Episcopal
palace. She was extremely intelligent and cultivated, and on the
intellectual side I am certain that she was a satisfactory partner.

[ 159 ]

I do not believe they quarreled or even had any serious disagree-
ment. There was in both of them a gentleness and an intelligence
which made quarreling seem vulgar and futile. Yet it was, I
think, that very lack of violence together with his wife's fragility
and delicacy which made all that was male in him cry out at
times for the violence and earthiness and passion of a wholly
different life. His own must at times have seemed made up
wholly of wraiths and shadows and drifting mist. I think any
man will know what I mean.

In his own life Ernest had a satisfaction which none of the
others of us really knew. He liked his work. He liked being a
lawyer. The history and the intricacies of the law fascinated him.
The rest of us never knew these satisfactions. We were all doing
something or other, however successfully, which had simply
happened to fall in our paths. Everything seemed to be all right
for Ernest but it wasn't. There were these times when he had to
go away and plunge deeply into another kind of life, hard,
physical, physiological, even, according to some standards, de-
praved. I had heard rumors of these excursions but had never
come across him during one of them. Whether his wife knew
of them I do not know, but I suspect that she had heard rumors.
It was as if he had at times to cry out from the depths of an
ordered, overcivilized life the violent, even the coarse words and
expressions of brutal passion. These strange, wild excursions
into the depths may have made a better man and a better hus-
band of him, and it is not impossible that his ethereal wife knew
and understood this.

But, with all of us, a trip like this brought a certain relaxation
and refreshment. It made us feel young again, and physiologically
at least such a trip was probably a good thing for us. The others,
save perhaps Ernest, indulged themselves far more frequently
than I did, and on the few occasions when I had taken part in
what might be simply described as a three- or four-day orgy, I
never went as far as the others. The odd thing is that, almost
without knowing it, each one of us was always hoping that
something marvelous would happen, that there would be a gleam

[ 160 ]

of excitement or even of romance or of something which we had
never known and very likely would never know. Only in the
case of Ernest was the attitude perhaps a different one. In his
intellectual aloofness I think these debauches were regarded by
him actually as regenerative activities, as if in some way they
recharged his batteries, as if wallowing for a time in the dregs
cleared his mind and body and restored his perspective. I think
that perhaps he entered them with a certain deliberateness and
even calculation as one takes a purge when one feels a bilious
attack coming on. In his case respectability itself in too large
doses had given him periodically what might be described as
a bilious attack of the spirit and the mind. As he took drink after
drink something happened to the rather lean ascetic face. The
rather tight look about the lips softened and at last disappeared.
Into the rather cold but very clear blue eyes there came a twinkle.
Not everybody noticed the change, and perhaps I flatter myself
when I say that I think he credited me with understanding, that
he looked upon me as a little above the others in intellect and
comprehension. I only say this because now and then, on the
occasion of some particularly commonplace or hypocritical ob-
servation made in our circle, he would give me a swift, concealed
glance of understanding.

As for myself I had never enjoyed these outings much beyond
the point where I had had enough to drink to make everything
seem rosy and all that I said seem brilliant or humorous or witty.
There were always women involved and now and then I experi-
mented. But I had never found anything satisfactory for a great
variety of reasons. Such women were usually stupid and all too
often they were avaricious. I learned a few things from them but
afterward I always felt the worse for such encounters, occasionally
repentant and sometimes filled with a sense of sordidness, but
usually with disappointment that the whole thing had been
merely rather cheap and insignificant and transient and without
meaning.

But on the occasion of this New Orleans excursion there was a
difference. I think that perhaps I approached a little the feeling

[ 161 ]

which affected Ernest that somehow in order to restore myself
I must be washed free and clean, rather like a ship hauled up in
dry dock to he cleared of the barnacles and seaweed which had
accumulated in great quantities on the hul. I felt as do the
members of some obscure religious sects that there can be no
repentance without sin and that it is necessary periodically to
sin violently in order to repent and be cleansed. I felt the need
of being cleared of all the barnacles and seaweed of respect-
ability, of hypocrisy, of monotony or falseness and boredom, of
the particular sea in which I was sailing out my life without ever
coming into any port. Perhaps if I could get clear I might arrive
somewhere or at least have the force to go on sailing. I was pre-
pared with coldness and calculation for any debauchery what-
ever, looking upon it as a good purge.

It would not have been so and perhaps I would never have
gone on the trip at all but for the fact that two days earlier Enid
and I had had a monumental quaprel, the greatest and perhaps
the only genuinely violent quarrel we had had up until then.

Whenever I went away on a trip alone she was resentful for
days in advance. It was the old thing, I believe that if I went
off alone I was escaping her. I honestly do not believe that she
would have minded any of the casual coarse infidelities, even if
she had known of them, nearly so much as the fact that I was
out of reach, that she could not for three or four days "share*'
everything with me. I doubt that suspicion or physical jealousy
troubled her very much. She was jealous of my "freedom/* al-
though it was something she herself neither understood nor
desired.

Immediately she scented that there was a possibility of my
making a trip, she would begin finagling to arrange it so that she
could go with me. In the beginning this worked, but presently
I learned to devise reasons why it was impossible for her to
go that the trip was too expensive or that I should be for the
whole of the time engaged in business and would not even be
free for lunch or for dinner. On the occasions when I did let her
accompany me, I found that she became incapable of leading any

[ 162 ]

life of her own even for a moment or two during the day. She
would ride with me in the taxi to any appointment I had or she
would plan to come and fetch me. The rest of the time she would
sit in the hotel room, doing what I was never able to discover,
for she was not a reader and she rarely knitted or sewed. The
subtle and curious thing is that she did not do any of this to
protect me from attack by other women or to thwart any secret
rendezvous I might have had but because she did not want me
to escape her. At times she became a great nuisance by insisting
that she be as important as myself in any gathering where women
were admitted. She would insist on attracting and holding the
attention, of others and interrupt or correct what I was saying.
She was one of those who habitually interrupt you in the midst
of a story with some remark such as, "No, dear, it wasn't Monday.
I remember it was Tuesday because it was the day the cook left
us." If she had been a mistress or a wife passionately in love
with me, all this might have been understandable, but this was
not true. She behaved thus and indeed her behavior became
exaggerated long after we had ceased to have any physical re-
lationship.

She began this particular violent quarrel by saying, *T can't
see why you have to go all the way to New Orleans at this time.
It's nothing but a convention and you won't even go to the
meetings."

Beginning on the old well-worn tack I said, "It will be good
for business and good for me. You're always telling me that I
don't pay enough attention to business and that you and the
children are going to starve.**

"You know perfectly well that the drunks you're going with
already take out all their insurance with you and they'll go on
doing it."

"Ernest is hardly a drunk. He's one of the finest lawyers in
the whole country."

*1 wouldn't trust Ernest Lawton from here to there."

This was one of the horrible remarks she used over and over
again until they became threadbare. They meant nothing what-

[ 163 ]

ever, but whenever she could not find any answer she injected
something like that which made no direct assertion but left a
cloud of suspicions, insinuations, and implications.

I turned to her and said, "Isn't it enough that I simply want to
get away for a while?" and added desperately, "Just f or a change!"

"No," she said flatly. "It isn't. Change! Change! That's all I
hear! All wives would like a change sometimes too!"

"Then why in hell don't you all go away and take a change on
your own? There's nothing to stop you. The children are old
enough to take care of themselves. It would probably do you all
good."

She didn't answer this but as usual veered elsewhere. '"AH you
do is go away and get drunk and God knows what else . . . and
then come home sick and full of remorse."

"Okay!" I said. "Even that sometimes does a man good/ 9

"I don't know what you do and I don't care. Only I'd like a
change too sometimes. It might do me good."

We were getting into one of those hopeless snarls which at
times made me feel that the inside of my head was like a clock
in which the mainspring has suddenly broken loose and every-
thing has begun to whirr about without sense, meaning, or
discipline. What she meant by "a change" was that I should take
her to New York and spend every minute of the twenty-four
hours with her, going shopping, to the theater, to bars and
restaurants she'd read about in the gossip columns and where she
knew no one. We did do that occasionally, for I felt that she
deserved it, but it was no change. Change, in essence, is not
related to a difference in furniture, in background, or even
climate. It is related to people as indeed are all situations of im-
portance to people of any depth. For me, or indeed for her,
there was no change. For me the whole thing was much worse
because at home at least there were the hours when I was more
or less alone at the office.

The whirring in my head got beyond endurance and I said,
TLook, Enid, there's one thing you don't understand and never
will because you won't let yourself understand it. It's a very

[ 164 ]

simple fact, psychological and physiological, that men and
women are different or should be if they're any way normal.
A man gets fed up with the order which a woman loves. She
wants security and solidity and everything going on every day
just as it has the day before. She's got a man who's given her
children and a home and pays the grocery bills and she doesn't
want any change. A man isn't like that Every now and then he's
got to cut loose. You can't fit him into a woman's pattern. The
average man, until he's too old to care, always wants changes. . . .
Maybe it's fishing or hunting or conventions or . . ." She attempted
to interrupt me but again I said, "Shut up! For just one moment."
Then I continued, "I never made you any trouble with other
women and I don't want to particularly, but by God now and
then I've got to get away for a time."

"I don't know why it's the men who have to have all the
change."

"You could go away any time you like and stay as long as
you like. The children and I will get on very well. Why don't
you? Ill tell you! Because you don't want to. You'd rather go
every day to the country club and the garden clubs and yackety-
yack with all the other women who don't want to go away unless
it means their husbands are going with them."

I heard a door opening somewhere and Enid said, "Shh! I
don't want the children to hear us quarreling."

"Christ!" I said. *T don't consider this a quarrel. I could really
show you a quarrel if I wanted to let go."

She began to cry. "The trouble is you really hate me!"

Then the whirring in my head became unendurable. I heard
myself shouting, ^You're goddamn right I hate you and for only
one reason that I can never get away from you for one minute
of the day . . . not even when I go to bed at night." I shouted
louder, "And 111 tell you something else. Beginning tonight I'm
going to move into the guest room and I'm going to keep the
door locked so at least for a little time in my own house I can get
away and be myself without having a goddamn blood-drinking
octopus devouring me, morning, noon, and night."

[165]

At that she gave a scream as if I had struck her (which I know
now would probably have suited her better and even pleased her
since it would have made her seem more important). Then she
screamed a second time, crying out, "A goddamn blood-drinking
octopus! Oh! Oh!" and dramatically struck her forehead with
her hand.

I felt an overwhelming desire to laugh, loudly and hysterically,
but checked it and then saw Esther standing in the doorway.
On her child's face was no expression of horror or of terror. On
the contrary, she looked perfectly calm and extremely interested,
as if she were watching a stirring domestic drama taking place
in a second-rate movie. There was no doubt whatever that Esther
was enjoying the scene which she regarded as an exciting double-
bill spectacle.

Then Enid spied her and, rushing toward her, sobbing loudly
and gathering the child into her arms, "You poor, poor child!"
she cried. "To hear your own father calling your mother such
names."

In a perfectly flat voice the child said, ^What's the matter?"

"I can't tell you now," sobbed Enid. Til tell you some day.
You must forgive your father, darling. Forgive him, you under-
stand, he doesn't know what he's doing/'

Esther looked at me with an expression of bewilderment and
then suddenly, overcome by Enid's caterwauling and hysteria,
opened her own mouth in cold blood and began to squawl.

That was enough. I went out of the house, slamming the door
behind me, and as I went to the garage a decision came to me.
I thought, Tm going to New Orleans and I'm going to wallow
in the gutter. That's the only way I can feel clean again after
this one."

Until then I hadn't much cared whether I went with the boys
to the convention or not, but after that scene the trip became
a necessity. It had to be done as much as if I had been told by a
doctor that such treatment was the only thing which could
save me.

And so there we were on the train bound for New Orleans,

[ 166 ]

four prosperous middle-aged or near middle-aged men, respected
as respectability goes nowadays. We were tired, and each one in
his own way was suffering from bad nerves and the frustrations
of lives which, in spite of every effort, seemed unsatisfactory
when we were not engaged in drinking or in physical exercise.
Youth was gone and with it hope, and none of us was as yet
reconciled to inaction, to the business of sitting back and reflect-
ing even if any of us save Ernest possessed the capacity for
reflection. But the most fearsome thing was that all of us, again
with the possible exception of Ernest, would have, when that
time came, damned little to reflect upon. If any of us lived into
old age, which seemed unlikely considering the strains and the
premature weariness from which all of us suffered, we should
simply be cantankerous and idle and unsatisfied old men.

What had wearied us? That is the thing I am trying to get at
as I write all of this but fail continually to discover. We were
wearied of many things of taxes and financial anxieties, of rush-
ing about always at top speed, of being persecuted by the tele-
phone and the automobile, of being unable to spend even a
single evening at home doing nothing but sitting with our
families and reading and talking. We were wearied by the
politicians and wearied of constant regulations and of filling in
forms for this and for that, of an almost total remoteness, even
in the case of Ernest, from those enjoyments which derive from
one*s natural environment, ... of that refreshment which comes
of smelling the fresh still air of the early morning and noticing
the aroma of freshly turned earth or sitting still to watch a sunset
or the water of a stream flowing swiftly along its willow-bordered
course. We were wearied of listening to radios interrupted by
vulgar clamorous commercials, bored by the monotonous dull-
witted movies in which we occasionally tried to lose ourselves.
We were tired of keeping up with the next-door neighbor, of
raising the money to send our children to the right schools, to
pay for fur coats and the new bathroom, tired of seeing each
other, of talking back and forth perpetually over the same
ground. I think, very possibly, we were sick of middle-class

[167]

American life which at the age of all of us had become merely
a treadmill on which we ran endlessly day after day without
ever arriving anywhere. And we were getting old. Although we
tried never to think of it, the thought was always there. We were
getting old, but the true horror lay in the fact that we were
getting old without anything having ever happened to us. It
would be over presently . . . and so what!

The sleep that followed quickly the heavy drinking was an
escape. It was the kind of sleep, induced by alcohol, which was
not interrupted by the fitful dreams and the wakefulness which
we struggled desperately to escape, trying to drive ourselves
back into unconsciousness because consciousness and reality had
become for the time being unbearable to us. If you drank enough
you were simply overcome and fell into a state of utter blankness
and void which was next to death. I doubt that any of the group,
save perhaps Ernest and myself, ever had such thoughts as these,
but the same will was there the will from time to time to black
out, to fall into that same intoxicated trance which was next
to death.

Yet we were envied. We were successful. We had everything.
Oh! Hell! What we had could be measured in terms of banknotes
or automobiles or expensive radio sets or tiled bathrooms or fur
coats. So what!

But we were on our way to New Orleans, the gayest city
outside Paris, to a convention to raise hell! And death was riding
with us!

About four in the afternoon the three who had blacked out
wakened and, a little foggy-eyed, came into the drawing room
I shared with Ernest. Tom, Dick, Harry, and myself started a
rummy game with Ernest watching, and the drinking began
again at once. Ernest, I noticed, drank more than any of us. He
said it raised his low blood pressure and made him feel better,
and it is true that I never saw him in a condition which could
even vaguely be described as intoxication. It was as if he soaked
it up after long periods of drought.

We were all drinking of course to set ourselves free and in the

[ 168 ]

end to bring about that drunkenness which was near to death.
The bad jokes and the great laughs at nothing continued and
grew more and more noisy. We had dinner, and after dinner
we settled down again to cards, playing poker this time with
Ernest taking a hand together with an automobile agency man
from Louisville with whom Harry had struck up an acquaintance
in the club car. Now and then other acquaintances bound like
ourselves for New Orleans looked in at the doorway and stood
for a time kibitzing with drinks in their hands.
God! It was all dreary!

X The Jungle

IJOMER, THE WOOL-HAT, WAS BIGHT ABOUT BOS HAVING HIT

a Jap that night when he fired into the jungle. We discovered it
today when I was returning with Al from the beach. It is not a
very good beach, being made up of rather sharp coral and you
can't swim very far for fear of sharks. I never know about them.
You hear so many stories out here in the East. Some say that they
will attack on sight and others that unless there is blood in the
water, which rouses their appetites and tends to infuriate them,
they will not bother you at all. What I do know is that there are
plenty of them about and that I'm not taking any chances or
allowing any of the men to take chances.

As a rule I go down with them in the morning for a swim
merely to keep an eye on them. We don't only have sharks but
we usually have a large audience of fuzzy-wuzzies as well. They
have discovered the swimming hour and come down every day
about that time, men, women, and children, to watch us. Homer,
who has managed, during Ms amorous adventures, some means
of communicating with them, and Solomon, a black boy who
worked once at Port Moresby, say that it is our white skins that
amuse them. They never seem able to get used to the whiteness,
and they even bring friends through the thick jungle from the

[ 169 ]

next village to watch us and especially to comment upon the
extreme hairiness of the Sergeant and the milky-white streak
of skin around the middle of Homer who never tans but only
turns shrimp pink. At first their presence embarrassed us and we
took to wearing shorts, but after a time we abandoned all
coverings and took to swimming naked again which is much
more pleasurable. I must say I have no feelings of modesty left.
It's a little as if that string of dark-skinned people covered with
grease and yaws, lined up on the edge of the jungle laughing
and making what are clearly dirty remarks, were no more than
a bunch of animals.

Al, the Kansas boy, and I came up from the beach today
together, and as we passed through the jagged coral that makes
a kind of barrier between the jungle and the beach, we caught
a whiff downwind of a stench concerning which there could be
no doubts. It was sweetish and sickly and repulsive. It was the
smell of a dead man in a hot climate, a smell which I had en-
countered on the other islands once or twice before I was buried
away here in this bloody hole. Al had never smelled it before
since he has not been in action, but when I looked at him I saw
that he understood.

"Something dead around here," he said, adding that all dead
animals smelled alike. But the odd thing was that the big strap-
ping Kansas farm boy had turned a little pale.

'We'd better go and investigate it/* I said. "It'll only get worse."

So cautiously for the coral could cut through the canvas of
our sneakers we worked our way upwind toward the smell.
We were on the right track because the further we went the
stronger became the repulsive odor. And then suddenly behind
a clump of bushes we came upon the Jap.

He was lying on his back with one hand clutched at a gunshot
wound in his abdomen, and the body had begun to swell so that
the whole abdomen was hideously inflated. The lips, as in such
cases, were drawn back to expose the projecting teeth, as if at
the very end he had been grinning hideously. There was another
hole in the chest just below where the ribs are joined, so Homer,

[ 170 ]

the wool-hat, shooting blindly in the dark, must have gotten him
in two places.

Death, the quiet death of old age or after a long illness when
it comes as a relief, or even the death of a suicide, is not in itself
distressing, since it seems to carry a certain sense of release and
of naturalness. It is in the order of things, or someone has taken
his own Life because it has become unbearable. But I have never
succeeded in reconciling myself to the death of the young who
wanted to live and had a pattern of experience and achievement
yet before them to fulfill. There is a shocking sense of unfulfill-
ment in the death of the young in battle. To me, that is what
makes the idea of war insupportable and irreconcilable, partic-
ularly in the somewhat meaningless wars of our time which are
caused by the confusion of man and of his machines, and men
no longer die fighting hand to hand but are more often than not
killed by some projectile coming from a wholly unseen point of
departure or by stepping on some hidden explosive monstrosity
against which there is no defense with not even the satisfaction
of combat spirit roused by the proper functioning of glands. To-
day men die not with a spirit of fury or gallantry or even any
longer in the sense that they are crusaders. The only emotion
they know is a humiliating fear, without relief or compensation,
since one cannot have a hand-to-hand struggle with a mortar
shell or a mine.

I once saw a dead general but he left me unmoved because it
seemed to me that, despite the fact that he had been blown up
in a jeep, he had got what he wanted and what was coming to
him. He who lives by the sword ... I confess that I was more
moved by the sight of this dead, swollen, wretched little Jap
than at the sight of the shattered body of the dead general. It
seems to me that at the sight of death one must, provided he has
any brains or humanity, ask, "Why?" and so as I stood there
looking down, I could not help asking myself why this poor
dead little yellow man should have been transported thousands
of miles from his home to be killed while trying to steal piled-up,

[ 171]

slowly rotting food out of an Army warehouse which had been
virtually forgotten.

As near as one could judge he had probably been little more
than a boy and undoubtedly he had no idea why he was fighting
or what it was all about. But in that he was no different from
Homer, the wool-hat, or a great many other common soldiers
I have talked to in our own Army. But here he was, dead, in a
world which made no sense at all,

To All said, "Poor bastard! Well have to bury him quickly
before he stinks up the whole camp/' and then I saw that ATs
face had turned from gray to white. A moment later he began
to retch and vomit The effect of the corpse on Al, who was a
farm boy, surprised me, but I felt sorry for him. I said, "Come
along. IT! send Homer and Meyer back to bury him. If Homer
can stand the smell of these fuzzy-wuzzies, he won't mind this/'

But Al said, "If you don't mind, Captain, I want to go back
to the beach."

For a moment while he continued retching I was puzzled.
Then I said, ^Okay/* and he went off across the white coral and
plunged again into the brilliant blue sea and I understood what
he was doing. He was young. He was washing the smell of death
off him.

Back at the camp I found Meyer washing his clothes and Homer
just sitting with his backside against the shady wall of the hut.
He was chewing tobacco and playing a game of seeing how far
he could spit. I called them together and said, "There's a dead
Jap down there by the beach. You two fellows get a couple of
shovels and cover him up deep or he's likely to smell. Dig the
grave up leeward side, and when it's dug you can take the jeep
and a cable and drag him into it! 9

A gleam of pleasure came into Homer's weak blue eyes. **So
I got him, did I?" he said*

"Yes, you got him in two places right through the middle/'

"I gotta see that!" he said. "Come on, Meyer/' It was the first
time I had ever seen him move quickly. Meyer simply stood there,
a look of fear in his big deer eyes. ""There must be others around,
Captain," he said. "He wouldn't be alone/'

[ 172 ]

"Sure there are/' I said. "You saw their footprints. But as long
as we feed 'em, they'll let us alone."

Then Homer came back carrying two shovels and called out,
"Come on, Meyer. I want to see the sonofabitch!" and they went
off together in the direction I indicated.

A little later I saw Al coming back, a towel wrapped about his
tanned naked body, and I called out. "Come in for a minute. A
drinkll make you feel better.**

He came in looking rather shamefaced and said, "I don't
drink usually but 111 take one this time."

The clear salt water had brought back his color, but he still
seemed a little shaky. "Tin sorry, Captain," he said sheepishly.
"I don't know what happened to me. I wasn't scared. It wasn't
that. I only saw one dead person before and that was my grand-
father and he looked kind of peaceful . . * in his coffin . . . and
right. I didn't get sick like this at aH."

I laughed. 'It's nothing. It often affects people like that. Some
people can't even stand the sight of blood. Sometimes they get
used to it and sometimes they don't."

He took the drink, swallowed, and coughed. "Maybe," he said,
"it would be a good idea for me to go back there and bury the
Jap alone . . . just to get over this."

"You don't need to worry. Homer will enjoy it. He vomited the
other night because he was scared but this kind of thing won't
bother him." I grinned. "Knowing Homer, he may even enjoy it."

"Don't think it was because I was scared."

"Sure I don't think that."

"It was just like I'd eaten something that made me throw up."

"You feel better now?"

"Yes." Then he looked directly at me and said, "Excuse me,
Captain, if I ask you something?"

"Sure ... go ahead."

"When do you think well get out of here if we ever do?"

"I don't know."

"I'd like to get out," the boy said. "On active service. I'm not
afraid of fighting but this is bell. I'm twenty-two and I've been
out here already almost three years wasting my time, wasting

[ 173 ]

my life. It wouldn't be so bad if I felt I was getting anywhere
or that any of this meant anything." He looked down at his
empty glass. "But it won't get anywhere. It'll just begin all over
again."

"What makes you think that?"

"If it isn't Germany or Japan ifll be somebody else unless . . ."

"Unless what?"

"Unless we finish the job right and tell the others what they've
got to do."

I didn't answer him for a moment and then I said, "You seem
to have been doing a lot of thinking."

He grinned. "What else is there to do in this hellhole?"

A look almost of excitement came into his face, and I realized
suddenly that all along he had wanted to talk to me but was
too shy. Now with the hot, unaccustomed whisky in his stomach
he had courage.

He said, "You know, I look at these fuzzy-wuzzies or that poor
dead Jap and wonder what it's all about. And sometimes I think
about the farm and the way things are there. You know a farm
is awfully close to the way nature operates. It's a kind of pattern.
It's pretty complex too a let more complex than most people
realize. It's complex, but it's got to have direction and some kind
of orderly pattern. You don't just say to all the animals, 'Now
we'll have democracy. You take over. . . / I mean the hogs and
chickens and cattle. . . . Tfou take over and run things. Make up
a government for yourself and take over.' That would be a hell
of a mess. The cattle would eat up everything so there wasn't
any forage when winter came. The hogs would eat the ducks and
chickens and there'd be yackety-yack and arguments about
everything. No, a farm, which is as good a pattern as any, has
to be managed and it has to be managed by the smartest animal
on it or everything goes to hell. And who's the smartest animal?
Why, the fanner of course. He's what holds it together and makes
it possible for all the animals to live at all."

There was a light in his eye and I did not interrupt him. *1
look at these fuzzy-wuzzies. Why, they're no smarter than our

[174]

collie dog or one of our brood sows . . . maybe they aren't as
smart as a sow who's the smartest animal on a farm. What I
can't get into my head is that a lot of damned fools want to set
the fuzzy-wuzzies free and tell them that now they must practice
democracy. And that poor Jap what the hell did he know about
anything? He just went on breeding when he shouldn't have bred,
until there got to be too many people and all of 'em were living
half like animals. And they were used just like animals sent out
to be slaughtered just the way we'd send steers to market/' He
put down his glass and scratched his blond curly head in a
puzzled fashion. "Sometimes I think we've gotten a long way . . .
too long a way . . . from such things as natural law. We get
sentimental about people and we keep alive a lot of people to
breed who nature would eliminate for the good of everybody.
And we talk about making people free who don't want to be free
and about giving democracy to people who have never heard
of it and couldn't understand it." He stood up suddenly and said,
"We're just goddamn muddles. That's all. That's why it'll happen
all over again until somebody like us Americans says, "Listen,
you! This is what you're going to do for your own damned good
and the good of the rest of the world!' Then maybe well have
peace and order and there won't be any more wars."

He hitched the towel tighter around his narrow waist.

I said, "There's something in what you say. God knows there's
too many people in the world, and most of 'em don't care much
whether they live or die, and some of them aren't much above
the level of animals. That poor little yellow bastard with the holes
in him was probably like that. Eat and breed and make Banzai
charges when somebody . . . some sonofabitch told him to."

Evidently the boy didn't want to talk any more. He said,
"Thanks, Captain, for the drink. I feel a lot better. Excuse me if
I talked too much. I think till my head aches. I want to get out
of here before I go nuts. When I think of all I might be doing
back home instead of sitting here rotting away, guarding a lot
of spoiled food, I damned near go crazy!" He looked at me sud-
denly. 'It's a waste you know ... a waste people and the world

[ 175]

can't afford when you multiply it by millions. Hell!" lie added.
"Sometimes I get sick of the lousy reformers!"

I watched him cross the brilliant sun-drenched strip of white
coral and I thought, "There's something in what he says and
they'll be back after him when it happens all over again." Because
I knew that he was right. Germany and England and France were
probably finished. There was only one nation strong enough to
bring order to the world, if it played its cards right. What would
happen if all the young people in the world rose up and said,
"We've had enough. We won't go on with this damned nonsense.
Let us alone to work and create and build"? But that, of course,
would never happen. They'd simply go on being killed or rotting
away in the abysmal deadly brutishness of a soldier's life.

Anyway, Al had a chance to let off a little steam* If he lived
and went back he'd be a good citizen, for at least he was one of
those who think things out. He didn't live by emotion and cheap
slogans and millenniums.

A little before eating time the Sergeant came across the white
sand to my hut. He said, "I just heard something over the radio.
They've used something called an atomic bomb on the Japs. It
seems they blew up a whole big town old men, women, chil-
dren, and everything with one bomb."

"I suppose it was bound to come some day."

"Well, it's something I wouldn't want on my conscience. It's
something I wouldn't want anything to do with. I'd be ashamed
before my own children . * * if I had any that I knew of."

''It's just bigger than any other bomb. That's the only dif-
ference."

"No, it ain\" said the Sergeant.

"What do you mean?"

"It's because we done it first. We hadn't any right to do it ...
at least not to be the first ones. It's horrible! It makes me kind
of ashamed of being an American."

"Take it easy."

Then suddenly he burst out. *1 am takin* it easy. I never had
any proper schooling like a lot of these here scientists and I

[176]

ain't never been President of the United States. IVe been an
immoral sonofabitcli all my life but there are some things I
wouldn't do. Whoever decided to do that is a cheap ignorant
sonofabitch. Somebody's got to have standards."

Then as if I had been responsible for the bomb he turned his
back and stalked out of the hut and across the blinding white
sand. After he had gone I lay down on my Army cot and lay
there for a long time thinking ... so long indeed that I forgot
all about eating. I kept piecing together what Al and the Sergeant
had said and, fitted into a pattern, it made great sense. They were
both ashamed in their ways of being American and neither one
knew quite why. I kept thinking back to Jefferson and his faith
in the common people who never got very far away from the
realities or from the same pattern Al had described in talking
about his family farm. They never had their common sense or
their moral sense distorted by ambitions and glory and egotism or
science and intrigue and vanity ... or, worst of all, by the feeling
that they were the saviors of mankind. They never felt that
warm, almost sexual glow of sanctimony which afflicts the frus-
trated perverted false Christers. The common man! Hell! There
wasn't any such thing. There were apes like Homer, the wool-hat,
but you didn't shed tears and sanctify them for being apes.

XI Oakdale

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT THE

three days in New Orleans. It is a town which has been designed
for just such excursions as that on which Ernest, Tom, Dick,
Harry, and myself were bound. They advertise it as a "convention
city" and that means that they make everything easy in the way of
drink and gambling and women for tired and bored middle-aged
men who are trying to escape from something and purify them-
selves of boredom and despair by a thorough, good bath, of de-
bauchery. Everything is made easy. The taxicab driver, the stray

I 177 ]

passer-by, even the bellhop, can "fix you up." You can hav<
anything you want The restaurants are supposed to be gooc
and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't The joint
are filled with a backwash of human beings who will provide yoi
with any sort of goings-on you prefer, no matter what. There are
plenty of other "convention cities'* like New Orleans. It is more
satisfactory perhaps than the others only because it seems more
foreign and therefore farther away from all the things the con-
ventioneers are trying to escape.

When I think back on that trip it always seems to me that the
whole impression is like one of these surrealist pictures in which
the whole place is a maze of narrow streets, dazzling with neon
lights that spell out "The Oyster GirT and "The Cat Girl" and
hands and arms attached to nothing, mere phantoms, which
reach out from narrow alleys and doorways to drag you in off
the sidewalks. It certainly seems like that after youVe had plenty
to drink.

I remember that we registered at the hotel for rooms which we
never used except to store our luggage and we registered at the
convention desk where we received badges with our names on
which we put into our pockets and forgot and I remember some
place where we had a pretty good meal and then everything
dissolved into the phantasmagoria which resembled the surrealist
picture. Most of all I remember my own state of mind. I didn't
care what happened. I was ready for anything at all. I no longer
had left the shallowest vestige of an inhibition. It was a wonder-
ful, almost voluptuous feeling.

Late that first night after we had made a round of bars and
joints we found ourselves toward morning in a big parlor with
an enormous shiny jukebox. The furniture was expensive but
bad a lot of overstuffed and ugly junk and the room was full
of women. They were of all ages from perhaps eighteen or nine-
teen to one or two, highly recommended by the madam, who
were probably over forty. Most of them were overweight and had
rather stupid faces, although two or three of them were quite
pretty and well dressed, and the madam told me that these were

[ 178 ]

not regular girls but came in occasionally from the outside.
Nearly all of them* were in evening dress in an obvious attempt
at elegance which misfired because there was too much of every-
thing on the dresses they wore.

The madam was in appearance exactly what you did not
expect a madam to be. She was tall and thin and dark and rather
spinsterish in appearance with perhaps a strain of Oriental blood
in her. She was "refined" but also tough. Tom had lost his hat
somewhere during the long night and was wearing a paper cap
he had picked up in one of tie joints. He was inclined to be
noisy and now and then broke out into singing loudly "Made-
moiselle from Annentieres." He had enjoyed the First World War.,
and when he got a little drunk he always went back to it the way
another type of man goes back regularly to college reunions. The
war had been a great event in his life. He had been decorated
for heroism and nothing had ever happened to him since then.

The madam didn't like his noisiness and said that the place was
a refined place and that if he didn't calm down she'd have him
thrown out. She wanted everybody to have a good time but in a
gentlemanly way.

The oddest of all of us perhaps was Ernest. With his thin dis-
tinguished face he looked out of place in such an establishment.
Although he had drunk quite as much as the rest of us in the
course of the evening, he did not seem drunk at all, or at least
he gave no sign of it, but there had come into his blue eyes a
look of singular intensity and into his manner an urgency and
even an enthusiasm which seemed almost obscene. I had again the
impression that he, the only one of us who might by any stretch
of the imagination be considered an intellectual, had come here
deliberately and with a purpose which he meant to carry out.
The odd thing was that somehow the purpose and the passion
behind it became translated as if by telepathy into the conscious-
ness of the more sensual women in the room. He sat on a low
sofa and there were always four or five women surrounding him.
Most of them were broad-faced and stupid in appearance, but
this fact seemed to please him, as if they were the kind of women

[ 179]

he wanted the fatter, the more stupid, the more vicious, the
better.

It was evident that the madam regarded me as the one most
capable of keeping order and making the arrangements. Ernest,
although sober, seemed obsessed, like a thirsty man coming upon
an oasis, and the others were too drunk and too gay to make
much sense.

She said, "Do you all want to spend the night?"

**Yes. You*d better arrange for them to stay until they get
enough and sober up.**

That will be expensive,** she said*

"It won't matter. Theyll all pay you. Ill be responsible for
that**

"Could you give me your name, and hotel?" she asked.

* "Of course," I said and wrote out a false name and the name
of a hotel where we were not registered. She took it without
blinking an eye and said, "It*s customary in the case of a high-
class establishment like this.**

That's aH right,** I said. "I understand.* 7

"What about some more drinks?**

"Yes, a round for everybody!"

It did not matter any more to me or to the others. Indeed, it
did not matter at that moment whether any of us ever left the
house at all. Certainly it did not matter now how much it cost.

One of the "outside" girls had taken me over, and I did not
object to this for she seemed quieter and nicer than most of the
others. She was small and neat and dressed in a perfectly plain
black dress and she wasn't noisy. Indeed, she looked singularly
out of place. Quite simply she asked, "Do I please you?'* and
thrust her hand into mine. It was a small warm yielding hand.

"Yes," I said. "I like you very much.**

"You won*t be disappointed,** she said. "I like you. Do you
know why?"

"No. TeH me.'*

"You*re very like someone I loved once . . ; the way your hair
grows, your mouth and eyes." She held up my hand and looked

[ 180 ]

at it. "Even the back of your hands. Hands/' she said, "can be
veiy good-looking. They tell a lot"

'Yes. That's right *

I was beginning to reach that point where drink no longer
brought any satisfaction and wben even the taste or smell of it
seemed repulsive. I had enjoyed drinking up until now, but now
there wasn't any more release to be found in mere alcohol.

"Do you want to go to bed?" I whispered.

"Yes, honey, if you're tired."

*Tm not tired. I just want to get out of this room and away
from all this noise."

"So do I."

She did not wait. She went over to the madam and spoke to
her for a moment and then returned and said, "Come/* and led
me out of the room and up a stairway to a room furnished with
a large double bed and some gilt chairs and tables. Clearly this
was an "elegant" establishment. Oddly enough, it was Ernest
who had known where it was and led us to it.

The next forty-eight hours passed quickly and in a kind of
blur. I was very lucky in the girl who chose me. She was passion-
ate and expert and yet quiet and rather gentle with it all. She
told me that she was a widow and that she worked at times as
a filing clerk but that she could not make enough money at it
to take care of her child as well as she liked. The child was a boy
about three years old. Sometimes she came to this place to pick
up some extra money, but she also came because her life as a
widow was insupportable and she had never found any man she
liked or could endure permanently who was willing to keep
or to marry her.

"Some day," she said simply, "I will find someone I want to
marry and who wants to marry me and then things will be all
right again."

Once she looked at me and said ? "YouVe been very nice to me.
You're a proper gentleman. You're very good too in other ways."
She was a rather simple child, like Manon. I had heard such
stories as she told me before now, but for once I had no reason to

[ 181 ]

disbelieve what I was told. She showed me a picture of her boy.
He was a nice-looking lad. The picture was a snapshot taken
somewhere on the quay because there was a river boat in the
background.

For two days I never left the room. We had our meals there,
brought in by a very fat Negro woman and very good meals they
were. Those two days were very peaceful ones. From the windows
you could see up a narrow street with the high river levee at the
end. The ships seemed to be floating in space, for you could not
see the river at all but only the high banks with the ships moving
slowly along at the top. There was no night or day, for I slept
when I felt like it. In a way it was Like a long, curiously refresh-
ing and voluptuous dream from which all the world was shut out.
It was all very simple and direct and without barriers. There
was in the whole experience a curious direct quality of children
playing and it made me feel wonderfully relaxed and rested. And
after the quarrel with Enid, it made me feel clean. There was a
kind of peace which I had not known for a very long time.

It had to come to an end sometime, but it came to an end in a
tragic brutal fashion when, just before noon on the third day,
there was a knock at the door, and when I had put a towel round
my middle and stepped outside I found the tall, dark, rather
forbidding madam.

She said, in an almost elegant fashion, *Tm sorry to disturb
you, sir, but something serious has happened. One of your friends
died a few minutes ago."

"Died?" I repeated. "Are you sure?'*

Tm very sure/'

"Which one?'* I asked, although I already knew.

"The tall one with the blue eyes and the gray hair. He said his
name was Barrett, but of course that wasn't his real name. Such
a thing is very serious for a house like this. You understand it
means inquests and investigations and all that kind of thing."

"Of course."

"And it might mean scandal for his family,"

[ 182]

"Yes where is he?"

"In the room down the hall. The girl is downstairs. She's
hysterical. You understand how it happened ... a heart attack,
I suppose/*

"Yes. What shall we do?"

"I have a plan worked out which I think will be satisfactory,"
she said, "We have a small hotel half a block from here. It can
be reached by a back alley. It takes in couples, but of course it's
not a recognized house like this one. It's a hotel. If he could be
found dead there in bed, everything would be all right and
respectable."

She looked at me searchingly as if demanding that I volunteer
as an accomplice rather than merely to accept her invitation.

"How can we manage that?"

"It's not too difficult," she said. *Tve had it happen twice
before in my experience before I came here. You understand . . .
these middle-aged men sometimes . . /*

"Yes."

'Til need your help and that of one of your friends. You under-
stand the gentleman has been dead only a short while. We can
still get him dressed. You and your friend can take him between
you and walk him down the alley to the hotel. Everything will
be ready. You can get him up the stairs to a bedroom and leave
him on the bed. There will be someone to help you up the stairs.
If you meet anyone who is curious you can pretend that he's
dead drunk. But it isn't likely you'll meet anyone. After you've
left the proprietor will knock on the door and when he gets no
answer will go in and find the gentleman dead in bed of a heart
attack. Hell notify the police and the doctor and everything will
be in order. You can then come back to the hotel to meet him
as if you didn't know anything and learn the news and make the
arrangements quietly and legally."

I listened, I confess, with a certain fascination, impressed not
only by the efficiency with which the operation was planned 8 but
also by the calmness with which the madam related the details.
Love and death, I thought, all in the day's work! Poor Ernest!

[ 183]

Til come at once/* I said. "In which room is the dark heavy-set
man?** I chose Tom quickly because he was the strongest and
the least likely to talk when he got back home.

She considered for a moment and then said, "I know where
he is."

Tie's the one to help us. Better tell him the story while I get
dressed and tell him I expect him to help/*

*1 want to thank you, sir,** she said. "You're being very helpful.
The whole thing is very awkward, but I think this is the best
way . , . especially for his own family/*

"You're quite right/* I said. "I won*t be long. Where shall I
find you?"

"1*11 be waiting in the hallway/*

As I dressed I told the girl her name, she said, was Ernestine
that I had had a sudden emergency message and had to leave.
She was to remain there in the room until the madam arranged
heir account. But all the time I was thinking about the madam.
She spoke extraordinarily good English arid made a nice choice
of words. Obviously she had been well educated at some time
and place. Why was she a madam? Thinking of her standing there
in the hall waiting for me, she seemed an omen or a warning, of
what I did not know* And I kept thinking, "Poor Ernest!** and
asking myself, "Why do I say poor Ernest? He*s probably very
satisfied.** In the first shock everything seemed clear and simple
and real with no nonsense of any kind. In a way, this is what
Ernest had come for. This was what he was seeking in his
weariness and boredom.

The madam was standing just outside my door, and together
we went down the hallway to find Tom who was putting on his
coat. He looked at me with an odd frightened look in his eye.
I don't think he had the resiliency which came to me out of the
long hours when I thought about things. He didn't think at all.
It struck him as the blow of a hammer might fell an ox. He was
curiously excited.

At sight of me he said, "This is a hell of a note!"

have to do the best we can/* I said "I think she has
[184]

the proper idea.'* I called the madam "she" because I didn't know
her name.

Very politely she said, "My name is Miss Del Campo."

Together the three of us got Ernest dressed. It wasn't easy.
If you're not an undertaker or you've never tried to get clothes
on a dead man, you can't imagine how difficult it is. And it was
very difficult to make the clothes look right on him as if he had
been wearing them instead of as if they had just been put on a
dead man.

Have you ever tried to dress a man freshly dead who is a
friend? The limbs have not yet stiffened and the body is still
warm, but the heart no longer beats and if you scratched the
eyeballs they would not respond. The eyes are dead. Yet you
want him to speak, to respond to your request to get on his feet
and walk. Only a little while, before you were talking to him
and now he is gone as if a light bulb had flashed brilliantly for
a moment and then died, burnt out and finished. It makes you
think of many things, of why we should want so earnestly to go
on living. If it was as easy as this, why do so many of us struggle
to go on, why is there anything so teixible in death? Certainly
nothing as terrible as the suffering which sometimes precedes
it? Certainly nothing so sordid and wretched as the sordid
unceasing material worries of daily existence?

To me it seemed, as I helped to pull the clothes onto the tired
thin body, that Ernest had simply gone to sleep for good. Even
the manner of his going was satisfactory if he found any pleasure
in it. I remembered suddenly the bitter comment of someone
that the body caused us so much anxiety and suffering that it in
turn owed us a great debt in pleasure and sensuality. But from
all of this was Ernest gone, escaped, perhaps to another life,
perhaps not. He would not have to drink any more.

In the shock and awe which had come over me, all the business
of morality, as preached by most Christian churches and by the
more ignorant and backward Protestant most of all, seemed
suddenly insignificant in comparison with birth and death and
even life for that matter. What tripe! What rubbish! What mat-

[185]

tered was that man should live to fulfillment of himself and his
possibilities. All else was insignificant. The world in which Ernest
lived had twisted and distorted his existence. In the end he had
been killed by it as much as if it had put him against a wall and
shot him, for he had died in reaction against it, fighting its
mediocrity, its conformity., its ignorance, its total lack of all the
splendor which God had put into this world for us to enjoy.

When at last he appeared presentable the madam helped us
raise him from the bed and get him between us. His arms were
put over our shoulders and we held him by the hands. We pulled
the hat far down over the dead eyes. This way we carried him
down the stairs and out into the alley as if he were dead drunk
and we were helping him. Such a sight was not unusual in this
part of New Orleans.

As the madam had promised, there was a man waiting for us at
the back entrance of the little hotel. If I remember rightly., there
was a sign over the door which read Hotel du Bayou. He helped
us up the stairs and led us to a bedroom where we laid the body
on the bed. Then we went back to the house to settle up every-
thing. I said good-by to Ernestine and thanked her and she
wrote her name and telephone number on a slip of paper in
case I ever came back again.

"It's a bakery," she said. <C I live above it and I help the owner
with his books. Hell always call me or take a message.'*

Then Tom and I routed out the others and told them the news,
and Tom and I went back to the Hotel du Bayou where we were
told officially that our friend had been found dead in bed.

The other three went home the next day but Tom stayed
loyally by me to help with all the tiresome details which were
more troublesome than we had expected. Together we brought
the body home, and Tom wished upon me the unwelcome task
of calling on Ernest's wife.

She had been crying and her grief made her seem even more
fragile and ascetic than usual. She gave me a drink of Ernest* s
whisky it was always the best in town and then said quietly,
"Tell me what happened. The telegrams didn't seem very clear."

[ 186 ]

So I simply told a story that we tad had an excellent dinner
and plenty of cocktails and wine and laad stayed out quite late
seeing the sights of the Latin Quarter. About four an the morn-
ing we had all gone to bed and the next day about noon I was
wakened by th proprietor who told me that Ernest had been
found dead.

"He must have died in his sleep," I said. If it had to be, it
was a good way to go/*

*Tfes," she said. "I suppose it was what he would have wanted.
His heart was very tired. He never saved himself. Sometimes it
seemed to me as if lie was driven by something which never gave
him any peace. He was a good man. I was never good enough
for him."

"You mustn't feel that way about it/* I said. "Ernest loved
you more than any man I know loves his wife."

She was thoughtful for a moment and then very quietly she
said, "Yes, I think that's true. The only thing is ..." She appeared
to search for words and then said, "I wasn't enough for him. You
understand what I mean. I should have been stronger and more
violent and more . . . more fleshly."

The use of the word shocked me at first and then I understood
that in her own shock and grief it was as if she were talking to
herself. "Men are strange things," she said. "The stronger and
greater they are, the stranger they are. I'm very grateful to have
been Ernest's wife ... no matter what he did. I couldnt have
stuck it out with most of the men I ever knew." And it dawned
upon me that very quietly she was letting me know the truth
and that she had known the truth all along. She said, "I always
liked Ernest to go away on trips like this. He didn't do it often
enough. If he had, I think lie might still be alive. He never had
much fun with me . . . except with things like books and music.
He couldn't find much of those things anywhere else around
here."

When I left her house I didn't go directly home. I drove around
for a while thinking about the things she had said, not being
quite sure whether I had read into them things which were not

[ 187]

there. But after a time it became clear that she had, in her deli-
cate, restrained fashion, told me the story of their lives, and I
understood suddenly that what I had heard was a very beautiful
story.

When at last I drove the car into the garage Enid called out
the side door, "Supper has been ready for half an hour/* and
when I came in she kissed me as usual, as if nothing had hap-
pened. She had not 'let the sun set on her anger." When later
in the evening she said what she had been waiting all along to
say, I decided the sun had set on mine, once and for all, and
that I no longer owed her anything or even liked her. I did not
care enough even to be angry at her. She said, "I hope what
happened will be a lesson to you. You're not so young yourself
any more. Some day youll probably die the same way "as that
dirty old man."

Somehow she had found out already.

About the time of the New Orleans episode I had begun again
to drink steadily. I am sure of some of the reasons but not perhaps
of all of them. At the root it was the old despair coming back.
For a little time I had escaped in reading and in the exploration
of worlds which were wholly new to me and of whose very exist-
ence I had been completely unaware. And then there arrived the
time of confusion.

When the first excitement over the mere discovery of reading
and the new worlds it opened up had abated a little, I began
to see that perhaps I should never have opened a book at all.
There was no one with whom I could discuss what I read or
learned. Before Ernest's death we sometimes touched upon these
things, but I always had the feeling that he found me naive, as if
I was discovering things I should have discovered and learned at
the age of twenty. I was also aware that on the occasions when
we were together his mind was tired and he was unwilling to
talk to me in words of one syllable about things which he had
long ago discovered, absorbed, and made an integral part of

[188]

his very mind and spirit. That knowledge made me increasingly
shy. And now of course Ernest was dead and there was no one
to talk to.

Because there was no outlet for the churned-up, congested
ideas and thoughts I gradually acquired, I began to suffer from
a kind of intellectual indigestion. It is difficult to describe this
indigestion but it was as if my head ached from being so
crammed with new and unabsorbed impressions. Added to this
was the confusion of a mind which, however ambitious, however
hungry, had never been taught either in school or in college to
think, and thinking, I suppose, is merely the process of using the
imagination and the mind in an orderly manner so that a creative
process takes place and a subsequent process of growth. But
with me there was no growth. There was no creation. In all my
life there had never been, until I was near to middle age, either
the necessity or the desire to think. Really to think is not a simple
thing. It cannot easily be taught, and learning by experience
requires time and a steadily growing maturity. I had already
lost nearly twenty years which should have been employed in
thinking, and because those years had been wasted I had never
attained any degree of maturity. I had merely grown older, and
like those men who constantly cling to their youth or return
to it at college reunions and Legion conventions, I had merely
withered.

I remember once having heard Ernest describe a common
acquaintance as "a man who had passed from adolescence to
senile decay with nothing in between." The description haunted
me, for it seemed to fit not only myself but all the people in the
world in which I lived. Some did not shrivel; they grew fat. But
the effect and the result was the same. Nothing either ethical,
moral, or intellectual had occurred to us since we left college,
and very little of change or inspiration occurred during those
days in college when we should have been learning to think and
become mature. I am quite certain that much of the weariness
which affected the body and spirit of Ernest arose from a feeling
of frustration that whatever intellectual life he had was always

[ 189 ]

confined to the interior pf his own head and the only sympathy
which he received was from his fragile wife.

Even now I have no feeling of maturity, I am concerned with
things which long ago should have been understood and put in
order in the general pattern of my existence, and even as I write
I am aware that I am putting many things on paper which
should belong properly in a college theme. I began too late after
too many wasted years, and I have attempted to grow in an
ill-watered and sterile desert.

Something of all of this went into the renewal of my heavy
drinking. When I try to find out why I came to drink more and
more, I can, from this distance in time and space, see it all a
little more clearly. My life with Enid was becoming steadily more
insufferable for a million reasons, but worst of all I had begun to
hate my own home, to dread returning to it, to sleep badly when
I was in it. I had begun to feel indifferent even toward my own
children, perhaps because they seemed merely to be growing
into small copies of Enid, stamped and molded by her ideas and
her ideals. In one sense they were the most normal of healthy
children, but in another they were becoming mere monsters of
"normality," performing on their level all the banalities of which
she had become for me the symbol.

I wakened in the morning not only tired but, what was much
worse, bored. I certainly had small interest in my business which
ran itself and I had no real interests elsewhere save in the reading
which had led me merely into confusion and frustration. I was
reluctant about starting the day and could see no reason for
doing so. A drink always helped. First it provided a physical
reaction of warmth and stimulation which got me on my feet,
and whenever during the day that sensation of false well-being
began to waver, I took another drink to preserve and increase it,
and presently I had enough to make everything seem blurred and
endurable if not pleasant and happy. From then on until I fell
asleep at last because my blood was filled with alcohol, the
world seemed a fairly agreeable place.

For a time the drinking grew so bad that friends began to talk

[ 190]

of it, as if I were one of those congenital drunkards whose sys-
tems cannot accept and absorb alcohol even in small quantities
without intoxication. There are many of these indeed I think
most drunkards fall into this category but I was not one of
them. I was always what was called "a good drinker/* I could
absorb vast quantities of alcohol without becoming drunk, and
never in all my life have I been able to attain the kind of drunk-
enness which becomes noisy and violent and offensive. As during
the episode in New Orleans, I finally reach a point where alcohol
no longer has any effect and becomes for the time being merely
repulsive. I was never the violent sort of drunk. I drank not
because of the weakness of the body but from a sickness of the
mind, and I was aware that this kind of drinking can become
the worst of all since it becomes an escape and a refuge and, as
in the case of Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is closely related to what
certain psychologists call the "death wish."

This "death wish'* is a curious thing, and I am* certain that
many more people experience it than any psychologists can esti-
mate. I am sure that there are ten thousand people who have
contemplated suicide seriously to everyone who has carried the
contemplation through into action. Drunkenness and drugs are
all too often the expression of the death wish among those who
lack the desperation or the courage to achieve the total and
permanent oblivion. I know that this is why I drank. It was the
desire to escape, wholly, entirely, without any reservation what-
ever.

Just as I planned on two occasions the murder of Enid but
lacked the will to carry through the plans, so I planned suicide
many times but always rejected the idea, each time because
there arose at the last moment in my heart a desperate hope
that if I stayed alive there might still lie before me experiences
that were new and perhaps satisfying. It is hope which keeps
many people alive. Sometimes too I thought that suicide might
be messy for the children and that I had no right to embarrass
or distress them. It would indeed be a horrible punishment for
Enid, perhaps worse than if I killed her, -for suicide was in her

[191 ]

mind the greatest of all scandals. It would have humiliated and
disgraced her and of course, I would have escaped her for good,
for once and all with the finality of death itself. Drink, I shortly
discovered, could provide the escape for a good part of each
day, and in the end, if the process continued long enough and
intensely enough, it would mean final and total escape, though
the process might be slow and painful and degrading.

It was worth noting that among my friends I was regarded
as a congenital physiological potential drunk, for there seemed
to be no other reason. They always said, "Why should Wolly
Ferris take to drink? He has everything!" and this, I must say,
was reasonable enough, on the exterior. I doubt that any of them,
with the exception of dead Ernest, ever had the faintest idea
of the reasons for my drinking or had the power to understand
those reasons. This is ironic, in view of the fact that many of
them sought the same "short death 5 * for reasons which were
similar*

I know as I write that whoever reads this may inevitably ask,
**But had you no faith in God? Could not the church have helped
you?" And I answer, "Perhaps,** but somehow the circumstances
never made it possible either for God or for the church to
help me.

Let me say that I believe in God as a force which somehow has
brought an orderly universe out of chaos. Whether He is an
impersonal, vague, and powerful set of laws still far beyond our
understanding, whether He is the vengeful Jahveh of the Jew
or the Santa Glaus God of the Italian peasant, who represents
all that is good and nothing that is evil, I do not know, nor do I
believe that anyone else knows any better than myself. God, to
me, has always been, I suppose, the Great Mystery which I
must accept without understanding, since I have no other choice.
There is no very great comfort in this, nor can one blame one's
own weaknesses or faults on something as vague as a Great
Mystery nor go to it for help in distress.

The few times I have prayed I have always found myself in
the final analysis praying to myself reminding myself that I

[ 192]

was weak or stupid or lazy or tliat I had done an ungenerous or
selfish thing and so violated rules which I knew and understood
perfectly well and which were as rigid and exact as the laws of
chemistry. After all, God is to a very great degree the Sermon on
the Mount and the Ten Commandments, and these we can touch
and understand and practice, and virtually all the evils in the
world arise from the fact that too many of us ignore this con-
ception of God and seek instead a bearded old man who will
excuse us our derelictions if we merely pray to him and recognize
him. That kind of God seems to me execrable and little more than
a concoction in the minds of those who are either too weak or
too cowardly or too unintelligent to live properly and decently
... as you might say, on a level with God Himself.

Certainly I have never made any great pretensions in that
direction. I have been as weak and as "sinful" as the next fellow,
and usually I have recognized the fact and it has depressed me,
which is probably a great handicap in the worldly sense, for it
has withered all capacity for ruthlessness. It has reduced me to
the level of those who only question without being able to find an
answer or to believe in one. And that perhaps is the great sick-
ness of my own small world and perhaps of all Christian civi-
lization. Perhaps it would be far better to be ignorant and
superstitious like my Sergeant, living only in the flesh and by
the flesh whose sins are easily forgiven and comparatively unim-
portant. Then I could have accepted a God who was like a
benevolent but sometimes angry father who bestowed favor
and dealt out chastisements. Certainly it would have simplified
my life and perhaps the lives of those nearest to me.

The trouble is that I, like so many of us, have been educated
to the point where a belief in such a God is no longer possible
yet we have not been educated to the point, either ethically or
intellectually, where we have the force and the courage to stand
. upon our own, each as an integral part of God Himself. We are
merely lost and at the same time somewhat pretentious without
reason. In short, middle-class contemporary man is a mess of
pottage and confusion, save in the realm of materialism out of

[ 193]

which he has created the porcelain water closet, the automobile,
and the atom bomb.

My hostility to churches and theology began when I was still
a small boy. It began when I was forced each Sunday to dress
myself in stiff clothes, polish my black Sunday shoes "my good
shoes" and set off for the Presbyterian Sunday School to pass
two hours and a half of misery until at last I could run down
the steps of the church after the morning service and escape into
my old clothes and the neighboring woods and fields. When I
was very small the "infant class*' meant little except marching
about and seeing great colored posters of remarkably clean and
sentimental and beautiful people entering the Promised Land or
strewing palms before Christ on a donkey. But that was much
better than when, as I grew up, I went on into an older class
"led" by a local prosperous shoe merchant named Wesley
Downes.

Elder Downes had a great reputation as a Sunday School
teacher in Crescent City and throughout church circles in the
state. He was a good enough fellow, plump, pink-faced, and
gray-haired, who found great pleasure in expounding the stories
of the Bible. This he did, I suppose, rather well, but .even at the
age of thirteen or fourteen I found it difficult to swallow either
a great many of these stories or his special versions of them. He
was, I suppose, what might be called a Fundamentalist. At least
he professed to believe everything that was written in the sacred
book and took all of it with complete literalness, even to such
legends as that of Jonah and the Whale which I once attempted
to dispute with him only to be humiliated by accusations of lack
of faith in God because I did not believe that a whale could
swallow Jonah, carry him around for a long time in his stomach,
and finally disgorge him intact and in good health.

Elder Downes believed absolutely that God had sent angels
to visit Sodom and Gomorrah and warn the bawdy inhabitants,
and he believed that, when the angels had to flee from worse
than death, God actually poured fire and brimstone upon the
evil cities of the plain. It was apparently inconceivable to him

[194]

that sucli a magnificent story could have been a legend based
upon some actual disaster and worked into dramatic form by an
Hebraic Old Testament Billy Sunday.

I doubt that he understood at all the full implications of the
story or the peculiar forms of depravity involved which were
perhaps common enough in those times and still are today among
certain Semitic and Moslem peoples. If he did understand even
faintly the implications, he never touched upon them for such
wickedness was something you did not talk about. For Elder
Downes the debauchery of Sodom and Gomorrah was, I am
sure, something like the "orgies'* depicted in the films of D. W.
Griffith or C. B. DeMille vast expensively produced spectacles
in which ladies waved bunches of grapes and bearded gentle-
men reclining on couches responded by waving empty papier-
mache goblets to indicate drunkenness. As I see it now, the
innocence of Elder Downes was colossal, but so was his vindictive-
ness. I do not think he was ever much troubled by fleshly
temptations. He was the plump eunuch gland type. He took it
all out in his performance as a minor prophet interpreting the
Bible to less inspired boys and businessmen.

Neither my father nor mother was very religious, and I am
certain that neither of them sent me to Sunday School or church
for the good of my soul or in the belief that I should find there
spiritual regeneration. They did it because sending one's chil-
dren to Sunday School was the thing to do. My own children go
regularly to Sunday School, and I doubt that they like it any
better than I did, although today all kinds of inducements, in-
cluding even movies, have been introduced to lure children to
Sunday School classes. They would still rather be at home in their
old clothes playing with the dog. But that, of course, would be
heathen goings-on and Enid would permit no such thing.

The church in Oakdale to which they go has a wonderful new
parish house equipped with the finest in modern plumbing. It
has a basketball floor, and as soon as the war ends and building
becomes possible once more they are constructing a swimming
pool. There are three pool tables and three ping-pong tables

[ 195]

and periodically there are dances for the young. I think this is
all fine as a means of keeping the young distracted and the
Devil from getting hold of idle hands, but I do not know how
much it has to do with God or faith or an understanding of the
universe.

With my father and mother it was their ''duty" to send their
children to the Presbyterian Sunday School. My father attended
church regularly and dozed more often than not, and my mother
went to church on the Sundays when she was not traveling and
uplifting the world. She saw her friends and received a kind of
homage at the church door as a woman well known in circles
outside Crescent City, but I am in grave doubts as to any spiritual
comfort she or my father received.

Indeed it was, I think, difficult for anyone to derive much
spiritual comfort from the ugliness of the old downtown First
Presbyterian Church which, even considering the peculiar hide-
ousness of tie churches built in its period, was exceptionally
ugly. It resembled neither the ornate beauties of an ancient
Catholic church nor the austere beauties of the New England
meeting house. Architecturally it was a mess which had cost a
great deal of money and required nearly twenty-five years to
pay for. The seats were placed like those in a theater beneath
two monstrous brass chandeliers with a pipe organ and choir loft
at "one end. The windows were enormous and filled with what
could only be described as monstrous concoctions of painted, not
stained, glass which resembled something which had been spewed
up or removed during an operation. If there was nothing beauti-
ful in it, neither was there anything which inspired faith or
religion. If it manifested anything it was the sound incomes of
a middle-class world in a rich, partly civilized, and growing
community.

Throughout most of my youth we had the same preacher. He
remained for so long a time because he managed never to dis-
please or alienate anyone in the congregation and managed
somehow to please most of them. Probably he was popular be-
cause he never disturbed his congregation either collectively or

[ 196]

individually. But this fact did not make for inspiration or good
sermons or even faith. I think that he bought most of his ser-
mons already written for him, and he never diverged from them
even by a single gleam of originality. The only ritual concerned
with the church was the fundamental ritual of attending services.
After many years my only impression of it was one of fabulous
aridity and boredom. I cannot imagine ever going to that particu-
lar preacher for solace, advice, or comfort.

And so as soon as I could escape I did escape, and I have
never gone back, even to the handsome new church with its
"modern" clergyman, its pool room and basketball court and its
ping-pong tables. The old church had nothing to give me in a
spiritual sense and I see no prospect of change in the new and
modern version which has supplanted it. Of poetry, of mysticism,
of beauty, even of faith there are few manifestations. It is as if
the "new" church were concerned with the body and its functions
and had no concern whatever for the spirit. The older church
had concern neither for the body nor the spirit.

All of this is no special criticism of any Protestant sect or
denomination. Many of them are worse than the churches I have
described and some perhaps are better.

It is possible that the Roman Catholic church might have
brought me something approaching strength and salvation, but
I never came close enough to it to understand or appreciate it
or to feel any special or irresistible attraction. Between me and
the Roman church there were many obstacles, not the least of
which was the long childhood indoctrination of Calvinist Prot-
estantism. The Jesuits themselves, I believe, are credited with
saying that they need train a child only during the first six
years of his life to claim him for the church forever. Whether the
Jesuits ever really said such a thing or not I do not know, but I
believe there is much truth in the saying. During my childhood
there was built up within me a profound and instinctive mis-
trust of the Roman church, indeed so profound that it came to
seem a foreign and even a Godless institution in which all sorts
of evil took place.

[197]

Certainly it played a small part in the world in which I lived.
It was wholly a Protestant world with two or three Catholic
families who, by the mere fact of being Catholics, always seemed
a little strange and never quite an integral part of our society.
Otherwise the Roman church in Crescent City was represented
by the immigrant population or the first generation of immigrants,
and between them and the world of Oakdale there was little
contact or sympathy. Among the women of my world there was
a feeling, subconscious at its mildest and aggressive at its
strongest, that being a Roman Catholic was actually a social dis-
advantage. It was a tight world, a Protestant world, and con-
sequently a materialist and middle-class world.

It was only after I came to know Mary Raeburn again that I
began to understand a little that I might have found some of
the things I was seeking within the Roman world. It was only
then that I began to understand how closely that world was
rooted in the whole history of Western civilization and culture.
It was only then that I began to understand the profundity of
the meaning lying beneath the outward symbols and rites which
until then had seemed meaningless and to a Calvinist mind so
much claptrap. Until then I did not understand that in those very
symbols and rites there lay an appeal to the intelligent and
cultivated mind and the roots of mysticism and beauty which
many of us were seeking hungrily without ever finding.

Yet even all of this was confused in my mind for it seemed to
m^ that there were in Crescent City, at least, only two kinds
of Catholics the immigrant element which, through ignorance
and fear, was bound to the church without reason and by no
more than a vague instinctive realization of the beauty and the
roots, and, on the other hand, those with intelligent and logical
but formal minds which accepted certain things which I could
not accept or laid them at one side for the sake of consolations
more profound.

But in all of this there was largely only a confusion of mind
and a groping for something in which there was a form and a
faith as there might be form in a beautiful sculpture or picture,

[ 198]

and faith of the sort which I sometimes felt as a child in the
country at sunrise when my heart cried out, "This is a wonderful
and beautiful world and I am grateful for being alive!"

I know that I was not alone in my confusion and my groping
in tibte darkness. There was the same sensation of being lost
among many of those about me, even among the four men who
went with me on the tragic trip to New Orleans. Three of us on
that trip did not know or suspect the sources of that doubt and
dissatisfaction bordering upon despair which drove them toward
the Tittle death" of drinking. But Ernest knew and I knew, al-
though with his trained and superior mind he understood the
aridity of his life better than I, and perhaps that very knowl-
edge and understanding drove him toward the grotesque ending
of that life.

When I am writing of these men I am not writing of Babbitts.
There are no more Babbitts. They belonged to a certain phase of
American life and that phase has passed. Babbitt, with his bump-
tiousness, his good nature, his extreme extroversion, tlie noisiness
which covered up his ignorance, is today a curiosity and in many
ways an outcast. All his qualities, his very problem, have been
supplanted by a kind of sickness and confusion unrecognized
by the victims who seek escape in materialism, in a supercharged
activity, and in drinking. Babbitt in his way was crude but
healthy. The sickness of which I write and which spreads and
grows constantly is quite different. I know of what I am speaking;
and I am frightened for a whole nation and a whole people.

This then was my state of mind on the return from New
Orleans. All this is why I was drinking again. I knew on my re-
turn that, while I should probably go on living with Enid for
the sake of the children, it would be a kind of life in death in
which we both hated each other, although hatred would not end
her passion for possession and "sharing" but only intensify it
because she was one of those who could not accept defeat. She
would not even admit to herself that hatred had supplanted
whatever love there had been. It would only be worse than
before and more ugly. Perhaps it would have been better if I

[ 199 ]

had run away or smashed things altogether, but there something
intervened. Call it decency or conservatism or habit or Calvinist
ethics and morality or what you will, I do not know. Perhaps it
was a mixture of. all of these things. Something still held me fast
in the pattern in which I had lived for nearly half my life. I
do not know whether it was for better or for worse. I cannot,
honestly, either praise or blame myself. I do sometimes think
that both Enid and I were victims of all the combined forces
which made each of us what we were the forces I have tried
so hard to trace back to the very beginning. I find myself as I
write coming back again and again to that apparently unanswer-
able question of why as a free and healthy individual I did not
simply walk out on the whole thing. Even now I do not know.

And then one Saturday afternoon I came upon Mary Raeburn
standing beside her car on the road from the country club. A tire
on the front wheel had burst and thrown the car off the road
into the ditch and she was waiting for someone to come along.
At a distance I did not recognize her, perhaps because it had
been a long time since I had seen her and the image I kept in my
mind was that of the rather plumpish young woman I had
known in my early twenties. If I had never seen her before I
would have been attracted. Meeting her under other circum-
stances, perhaps only in passing her on the street, I would have
turned for a second look, not because she was beautiful or even
very young, but because there was something about her which I
as a man would have found appealing.

It is not easy to say what that something was since it was
compounded of many things, of the look of quiet serenity that
was in her face, the way she moved, not tottering along on over-
high heels, her buttocks shaking as she walked, but moving
surely and with a certain swift grace. Perhaps it was the way she
dressed, quietly but with a sudden flash of color at the throat
or on her hat, or perhaps it was the cut of her clothes, simple yet
perfect, and the way she wore them. There are some women
whom you could dress in the most expensive and beautifully
cut clothes who would still look dowdy and others who would

[ 200 ]

make a Mother Hubbard appear beautiful and smart. After we
came to be intimate there were a hundred little things I noticed
about her, perhaps most of all a certain fastidiousness. There
was never lipstick on her teeth. Her hands and nails were always
perfectly done. There was a land of art in the way she fastened
a scarf with a pin. Her hair seemed always perfectly in control.
And she never wore too much of anything. The fastidiousness
and perfection gave her an air of coolness which I discovered
later was wholly deceptive, but it also gave her an air of calm
and of order as if she had everything under control which at
that moment perhaps was the thing I desired most in all the
world.

XII The Jungle

LAST NIGHT AN UGLY THING HAPPENED. HOMER, THE

wool-hat, shot another Jap and I do not know now what will
happen. We had had peace for many weeks with one or two of
the Japs coming out of the jungle in the middle of the night to
take the food we left out for them. I suspect they understood the
truce and the arrangement and were willing to let it stand so
long as we were here, all of us together, on this godforsaken island.
The second poor Jap Homer got right through the heart so
that he was only able to run a few steps before he fell on his
face and died. The shot roused me and I was the first to find
him lying face down in the moonlight on the white sand dark-
ened by a small pool of blood. Scattered around him lay some
three-year-old tins of soup and baked beans. He was about the
same age as the first Jap, and having been alive only a moment
or two before, he did not have the horrible, grinning, half-
decayed, inhuman look of the other. The Sergeant turned him
over, and as he did so a great and weary sigh seemed to emerge
from the dead body as the air was pressed out of the lungs.
Under the flashlight the face seemed like that of a little boy,

[ 201 ]

like those Japanese babies with cropped hair, or like a cheap
Japanese doll. He had the long body and the short strong muscu-
lar legs of a peasant

The Sergeant said, "He's dead all right!'' Then he turned to
Homer. "What'd you shoot him for? The poor bastard wasn't
doing anybody any harm.**

Homer said, "He ran at me and hit me! I shot him in self-
defense/*

The Sergeant said, **What'd he hit you with a can of soup?**

"He tried to jump on my back. I was smart and shook him off."

The Sergeant scowled and I knew that suddenly the ferocious
temper was about to give way. It was only a question of seconds.

"I suppose/* the Sergeant said, "he climbed you with his arms
full of canned goods." He kicked away one of the scattered cans.

Homer, the wool-hat, began to whine. "What are you pickin*
on me for? You ought to be thankful I kin shoot. He mighta
killed all of us."

"That poor little bastard with nothin* to kill us with but Camp-
bell's soup!" Then a sudden thought occurred to him. "Wait a
minute/* he said and bent down and turned the flashlight full
on the shattered chest of the dead Jap. After a second he straight-
ened up and said, "You shot him in the back, you white trash
sonofabitch! You shot that poor starving little bastard in the
back when he was goin' away with his arms full of groceries.
He was trustin* us and you shot him in the back. I oughta kill
you . . . that's what I ought to do ... you and your goddamn
squirrel shootin*. I suppose you learned that on one of your
famous nigger hunts. I can't kill you but I'm sure gonna beat
hell outa you/'

With that he smashed his fist straight into Homer's face and
Homer began to yell. It didn't last long for Al and I, with the
help of Meyer, managed to drag the Sergeant off and quiet him.
If we hadn't been there he might have killed Homer. I knew it
wasn't only the fact that he had shot a defenseless man in the
back which enraged the Sergeant. It was much more than that.
It was all the things Homer was, the way he thought, his evil

[ 202 ]

stupid prejudiced mind, his physical dirtiness. The whole flood
welled up and burst.

The blood was streaming down Homer's face and he was blub-
bering again and whining, "Jeezl 111 get you for that! Ill
get you if it's the last thing I do ... you goddamn nigger
lover!"

"Shut up/ 7 I said. "Go and wash your face. Ill take care of
this later.*

The Sergeant ignored him and ordered Al and Meyer to go
and get a shovel and the jeep. None of us wanted the dead Jap
lying around there all night. Left alone with me, the Sergeant
said suddenly, "What a bunch of damned fools we are standin'
out here in the moonlight. If there is any more Japs and theyVe
got a grenade or a gun they could fix us all and quick like sittin*
birds!"

But if they hadn't fixed us by now it wasn't likely they'd fix us
before we got the body down on the beach sand and buried, so
we went along with our work. Maybe there weren't any more
Japs. Maybe there had been only two of them and after the first
was killed this poor little bastard had been left alone, hiding
in the Jungle by day and coming out by night to pick up what
we left out for him, living off the handouts we gave him. On
the sand where we left the canned goods there had never been
more than one set of footprints, very neat, coming and going.
The sky was turning pink over* the lagoon by the time the boys
had finished their task and I fell asleep at last.

The tacit truce with the hidden Japs had been a helpful thing
for our nerves, but it had served to soften very little the tension
and monotony which grew steadily worse. The "going-over" of
Homer by the Sergeant had indicated how quickly violence and
hatred and perhaps even murder could flare up. And now the
truce with the Japs had been violated and we could not know
what to expect.

In the morning the Sergeant came to me and said, "Maybe
we'd better take the guns away from Homer altogether. He's a

[ 203 ]

nasiy piece of goods. Hell always find an excuse for what he
wants to do/*

We talked of such a procedure for a time, but I pointed out
that if we did that, it would increase the guard duty for the other
boys. This would be unfair, and it may have been that this was
exactly what Homer was playing for. ... If you couldn't put him
on guard duty he could sleep all night. You couldn't punish him
by putting him on kitchen police or making him permanent cook
because nobody would eat after him. You always kept thinking
of the black women and their yaws which you couldn't keep him
away from. He was crafty enough. I sometimes wondered why
he had not managed long before now to get himself thrown out
of the Army altogether. Certainly if there had been any way of
throwing him off the island we would have done so long ago.

In the end we agreed that by constantly threatening him with
punishment we might keep him in order and make him pull his
own weight something he avoided doing whenever possible.
That appeared to be the only kind of treatment he understood.

Just as we finished talking, an Army plane buzzed us and
dropped a bag of mail, the first we had had in nearly a month.
There were two books for me sent by Enid and a letter. It was
not very interesting, mostly gossip and household matters, but
for the first time it seemed to me to come out of a strange, re-
mote, and utterly foreign world, and at first this alarmed me.
Perhaps I thought, "I'm becoming a beachcomber." On consider-
ation the prospect did not displease me. It might even be a
solution to go on when the war was over, wandering from
island to island in the Pacific. I could even be quite a luxurious
beachcomber with the money I could arrange to have sent me.
I discovered suddenly that I actually did not dislike even this
lonely forgotten existence I was leading. It was monotonous,
but there was more peace in it than I had ever known and in a
negative sense I was happy, perhaps because the writing has oc-
cupied so much of my time and given me a sense of satisfaction.

When I had torn up Enid's letter there was no reason to
preserve its emptiness I left the hut to walk down to the beach

[ 204 ]

for a late-morning swim, and as I passed one of the great clumps
of dying mangrove isolated by the coral sand, I heard the sound
of sobbing. It was a desperate heartbreaking land of sobbing
and I felt forced to investigate it.

In the midst of the mangrove clump I found Meyer lying on
his face. I bent down to him, thinking that at last his nerves had
broken, and asked him what the matter was and whether I
could help him in any way, but he could not answer me at first
After a little he sat up, looking ashamed, and rubbed the sleeve
of his shirt across his eyes, but he still could not speak. His
body was shaking like that of a child who has been crying
violently and cannot stop sobbing.

I persuaded him to return to my tut, and there, seated on my
bed, he managed to get control of himself and talk with some
degree of coherence.

He had had a letter from home telling him that his mother was
dying of cancer and could not live until he could get back. She
had been ill for a long time but would do nothing about it
until it was too late. His sister had written at once, but she said
the doctor did not expect the mother to live more than a few
days and the letter had already been two weeks on the way.
That was all, and now Meyer sat on the edge of my bed staring
into space and answering me politely enough if I asked him a
question but otherwise behaving as if he were dazed.

I did manage to find out some things of importance that he
was an only son. The only other child was a sister older than
himself. And I discovered how profound is the Jewish sense of
family and how closely knit are the ties among orthodox Jews
like himself. And I came to understand why it was that he was
always so silent. Here on this island, surrounded only by Gentiles,
he felt completely uprooted and perhaps more lonely than any
of us, for it was not only America or even Brooklyn for which he
was homesick but for the close tight little circle of Jewish rela-
tives and friends a citadel from which ne had seldom made a
sortie into the world outside. So closed had it been, so conven-
tional in its ancient ghetto traditions and its religious orthodoxy,

[ 205 ]

that he was in truth a foreigner not only to Brooklyn but to
everything which was commonplace in American life to the rest
of us. I had lived all my life in the world of Crescent City and
Oalcdale and AI, the big farm boy, in the open country of Kansas.
The Sergeant was at home anywhere save in circles which so-
cially or intellectually were above him. Even Homer, the wool-
hat., had some traditions in common with the rest of us. But
poor Meyer was a stranger. There had never been anyone to
whom he could turn, no one who would understand his world
or what he felt about his family. With Homer and even at times
with the Sergeant he was constantly reminded that he was not
only a stranger but a Jew. And now this tragic news. He had
every reason for hiding in the jungle to sob his heart out.

I tried to get through to him, but I am afraid I was not very
successful. I shall go on working at it, for if I can only get him
to talk it will make things easier. It is one of the tragedies of the
Jew, perhaps the greatest of the many tragedies .which the Jew
has borne, that persecution and segregation have exaggerated his
human traits out of all proportion and often to the point of
caricature. It has made too many Jews into extreme introverts
or extreme extroverts. It has made neurotics and psychiatrists
or kibitzers and gangsters. Meyer was the extreme introvert who
in order to exist needed that familiar small world in which his
wife and his mother and his baby possessed an importance which
few Gentiles will ever understand.

I said to him, "Look, Meyer, whenever you want to talk, come
in here and talk . . . about anything at all. I always have time.
I haven't got anything else to do."

He answered me without looking up from the floor, ^es, sir.
Thank you."

TT1 make a superhuman effort to get a plane for you, but
there's no use kidding ourselves. There isn't enough time and
it would have to be an amphibious number. You understand that,
don t you?"

His thin little body shook suddenly with a sob beyond his
control. ""Yes, sir. I understand it." Then he sat up and looked

[ 206 ]

at me for the first time out of the great brown liquid eyes,
speaking with the grotesque accent that comes out of some parts
of Brooklyn. "It don't make things any easier." His body shook
again and he said, "You see, I was a baby when my mother came
from Poland. They had a hard time. She used to do any kind
of work and go without food for my sake. She wanted to get
ahead. She made me go on to school wlien I could have gone to
work to lielp her. And now . . . shell be gone. . . " His voice
trailed off and his head slipped down between his hands and he
stared at the floor.

Presently I said, "Look. You don't want to go back to the
barracks now. You stay here. Lie down on the cot. Cry your
heart out if it does you any good and try to go to sleep. Sleep
can do wonderful things. It's like morphine. Ill go and try to
get a radio message through. YouVe a right to go home even if
it* s too late. Ill do everything I can."

He sat up erect once more but looking down at the bed in a
strange way as if he could not bring himself to be so presumptu-
ous as to lie on the bed of an officer.

"Go on," I said. Tim going to get the Sergeant to try and
send a message." Then I left because I knew that as long as I
was there he would not lie down.

As I walked across the white sands to the Sergeant's hut I
felt depressed and frustrated that I could not get through to a
fellow human being, that there should be so many intangible but
impassable barriers between us. I was troubled too because the
radio had been working badly for a long time and the parts
which the Sergeant had requested had not been forwarded or
had not arrived. It was the kind of thing which happens in the
Army to forgotten men like ourselves.

When I walked into the Sergeant's hut I found him tinkering
with the transmitter.

"Got it working?** I asked him.

He answered me without looking up. "Hell, no!" he said. "This
time I think it's out for good. IVe patched it up for the last
time.**

[ 207 ]

I grinned. That kind of leaves us isolated," I said.

He slammed the coil of wire lie had in his hands on the floor
and began to swear. It was a magnificent performance in which
he employed about every four-letter word known to the English
vocabulary of filth. Because it was so passionate and magnificent,
the words he used did not seem dirty. He finished up by saying,

"Once I get out of this Army, 111 stay away from it as far

as possible.'*

"The trouble is," I said, "that wars and armies are out of date."

Then I told him about Meyer, and as he listened he seemed to
melt. When I finished he said, "The poor little sonofabitch!" and
after a moment* s silence he said, "He's a funny little guy. I can't
like or dislike him. He don't seem human sometimes . . . he's so

goddamn quiet," adding, "Well have to get the transmitter

fixed somehow and try and get a plane down here."

I was thinking ahead of him and said, "If he gets out you know
what it means, don't you?"

"No, what?"

"The chances are they wouldn't let any of the rest of us off
for weeks or months. They won't send any replacements out here
and they won't let us cut down the post to three men."

A deep scowl came over his face. "Hell, I never thought of
that! Hell!" This time he had not enough profanity left to re-
lieve his feeling. He picked up the tool kit that was lying beside
him and threw it, with all his immense strength against the side
of the hut. The case smashed apart and the tools flew in aE
directions.

I said, "Do you think you can fix the thing up for a last time?"

He was silent for a moment and then in a very quiet voice he
said, "I can do my best. That poor little bastard hasn't got any-
thing in the world but his mother, his wife, and his kid!" Then
slowly he began to pick up the scattered tools, saying, "111 get
Al in to help. Sometimes he's got smart ideas. He's smarter with
tools than I am."

"Thanks," I said. "You're a good boy."

As I went out the door I heard him saying, "Tell that to the

marines!"

[ 208 ]

I went into the jungle along the path that led toward the
fuzzy-wuzzy village. I didn't want to disturb Meyer and there
wasn't anywhere to go but down to the beach or along the path.
The air smelled of growth and desolation, of dampness, of birth
and decay and of growth feeding upon decay. I wondered
whether the Sergeant would really try to repair the transmitter
and get to the outside world. If they could send a plane in, it
meant that Meyer would go out and the Sergeant would be left
behind, denied what he wanted most in all the world escape
and some women and some excitement. There were many things
he could do. If he allowed the transmitter to go unrepaired for
a few days it would be too late to do any good so far as Meyer
was concerned. The Army didn't send you halfway round the
world simply to attend a funeral or to get consolation from the
surviving relatives. The only hope of getting leave for Meyer was
that we could get through quickly enough while there was still,
by some miracle, a chance of sending him home while his mother
was alive. Even then it would depend on the kind of man the
officer at Kinoko was. But, of course, the whole thing really de-
pended upon the Sergeant himself. It was for him to choose to
sacrifice the thing he wanted most in Me at the moment.

I walked nearly as far as the jungle village, near enough to see
the huts raised high on stilts with the skinny pigs and mangy
dogs foraging underneath among the garbage and excrement.
I could smell it from a great distance, a smell of filth and heat
and disease that was perhaps worse than the smell of the dead
Jap. Then I turned back.

On my return I went instinctively down to the beach for a
swim, as if to rid myself of any trace of that horrible smell, and
then returned to iny own hut.

Meyer was lying on his back, his head a little on one side.
The dark skin of his cheeks was wet with tears, but he was asleep.
Leaving him undisturbed I went over to the Sergeant's hut,
and as I reached the door I heard him testing the transmitter.
Al was beside him. Both of them were dripping with sweat.
I stood in the doorway listening, and presently my shadow, fall-
ing across the floor, attracted the Sergeant's attention. He went on

[ 209 ]

sending out his signal and listening and without speaking he
grinned and nodded his head, and then presently it came clear
and he called me.

We had managed to get Kinoko, but both transmission and
reception were weak and blurred. When I got the commanding
officer I managed with great difficulty to tell him the whole story.
It was a maddening business. I believed that if I could have
talked to him directly or even clearly over the transmitter I
could have fixed things for Meyer, but how can you make a case
to a strange officer you have never seen when you are five hun-
dred miles away talking in waves which alternately roar and
recede into silence interrupted by a steady crackle of explosions?

Finally I did get the stoiy across and presently I got back
the answer through the maddening silences and static uproar.

It was no good. They hadn't seen a seaplane at Kinoko in
three weeks and did not know when they would see another.
That was the end of it.

All the time I had been talking, the Sergeant and Al listened
with strained faces, and before I cut off communications they
had already divined the answer. When I turned to them the
Sergeant said, "It's a goddamn shame!"

I wanted to hug him, but I only put my hand on the huge
shoulders and said, "Well, anyway, you did all you could/' He
looked up at me and I added, "And that was plenty!"

And plenty it was. It had been his first turn at leave from this
maddening godforsaken spot and he had been willing to sacri-
fice it although he need never have done so. A leave meant
nothing much to me one way or another. In fact I didn't want
it until Td finished the writing I was doing and even after that
I felt no strong desire to go back into the world, but the Sergeant
was different. He lived by his senses to eat and drink and make
love. As I walked back to my own hut I felt better than I had
felt for a long time, for I had, witnessed self-sacrifice and some-
thing approaching heroism.

Meyer slept until nearly dark, and when finally he awakened
I told him as gently as possible the bad news. When he heard

[210 ]

it lie did not cry. Behind him for generations there was a kind
of stoicism which manifested itself once the first anguish had
passed.

Quietly he said, "Thank you, Captain. I know youVe done
everything you could/ 7

"It's the Sergeant you must thank/' I said. "He was willing to
give up his leave for you."

"I know that, sir/ 7 said Meyer. "Maybe some day I can do
something for him/'

"You'd better get something to eat/' I said. "Al is cooking to-
night. Usually he has something good/'

"I don't feel hungry/'

"Try to eat anyway.** I put my arm around his shoulders.
"There isn't any use saying anything except maybe that we're all
for you/*

"Thanks, sir/'

I watched him walk across the sand and it was the walk of
a man moving in a trance, and suddenly a fantastic thought came
into my mind "What if it had been my mother?" but the
thought left me numb and without reaction. I knew that at first
I would feel a shock and perhaps remember one or two happy
moments in my youth which were connected with her and after
that I would feel nothing at all save perhaps the relief that I
should not have to see her again. It would be like hearing the
news that a public institution had collapsed and died. For a
second I felt an anguish of envy for poor little Meyer that he
had a humble Jewish mother instead of a prominent do-gooding
public character.

That night Meyer did not come to mess but lay on his cot
in the darkness of the hut he shared with Homer, the wool-hat.
On hearing the news the latter made no comment at all or even
displayed any interest.

After supper the Sergeant and Al and I went down to the
beach with the net the two of them had made of unraveled rope
and caught a few small fish which we cooked when we returned
after dark, and after that I left them and came back to my type-

[211 ]

writer to set down in my journal what had happened during the
day. When that was finished I turned back again to the biography,
working late because I was writing about Mary Baeburn whom
I had loved and who had taught me what love could s be, and for
a little time I managed to recapture in memory something of
that glow which had illuminated all that brief part of my ex-
istence.

Very late it must have been nearly one in the morning the
sound of a footstep in the doorway startled me and I thought
at once of the Japs that Homer might have stirred up. But in the
moonlight I saw that it was Homer himself, his gun slung across
his shoulder.

The sight of him always depressed me, but I managed to say,
"Yes, Homer."

He said, "Kin you come with me, Captain? I wanta show you
something."

'What?' 9

"I cain't tell you. I gotta show you."

Is it important?"

"Uh-huk"

It might be important or it might not and with Homer you
could never tell. His standards of importance were peculiar. I
had finished writing for the night and so I went with him. He
led the way, walking a little in advance of me across the white
sand that sparkled in the moonlight, in the direction of the
Sergeant's hut. There he stopped by the open doorway and
motioned with one hand. The moonlight was brilliant and I
suddenly saw the swollen eye the Sergeant had given him the
night before for killing the poor Jap. As I stepped up beside him
he turned on the electric torch, throwing the beam against the
roof of the hut so that the inside was illuminated by a diffuse
light.

"Look," he whispered, pointing toward the mosquito netting
that covered the two Army cots placed side by side on which
slept the Sergeant and AL "Look," he repeated in a low voice,
*ldn you see?"

[212]

What I saw was the Sergeant's heavy figure on one cot and
the tall body of the Kansas farm boy on the other. I couldn't
understand what Homer, the wool-hat, was talking about until
he snickered and then I noticed that one of the Sergeant's arms
was thrown outward and across the body of AL

I turned quickly away from the doorway lest one of them
should waken and see me there as if I had been spying on them.

"Come," I said sharply to the wool-hat, and when we were
a good distance from the doorway I said, "What were you trying
to show me? Are you crazy?"

He didn't answer but merely snickered again and I have
seldom heard a filthier sound.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

He snickered a third time and said, "I tried to tell you a long
time ago something was goin' on."

For a moment I could not find words and then when I found
them I managed somehow to hold them in, for if I had spoken I
would have said worse things than I said to him on the night
he vomited after shooting at the first Jap. As an officer I could
not say to him what I wanted to, nor as an officer could I beat
him up. Presently when I had gained control of myself I said,
"I think I know what you're trying to say ... I think I know
what you're trying to do. You're a damned nasty piece of goods
and don't ever do anything like that again. You'd damned well
better behave yourself from here on out!"

He muttered, "I thought I was doin* what was right"

Again a wave of rage swept over me and again I held my
tongue and my fists. I said, "Those are two of the best guys in
the world. You keep your filth and your dirty black women to
yourself." Then he snickered again and I felt as if suddenly I
had been contaminated by the mere sound, as if he had smirched
me with some of his own physical filth. I managed to say, "Now
get back to your post and don't do any more shooting or I'll
take that damned, gun away from you for good." He stood there
silent in the moonlight. "You heard me," I repeated. "Get going!"

He looked toward me, suddenly thrusting out his thin neck

[ 213 ]

in a gesture which seemed like the peck of an angiy buzzard.
His back was to the moon and his face in the shadow so that I
could not see his expression, but I knew that it was one of
murderous hatred for the Sergeant, for Al, but most of all for
myself.

When he had gone I thought, "We've all got to get out of
here before something terrible happens!"

Back in my hut I lay awake for a long time, disturbed and
worrying about many things, among them the tragedy of Meyer,
which was only one among thousands caused by an idiotic war,
and the tragedy of Homer and his hatreds. What did they come
from? Why should he be burdened by this intangible mess of
perverted ideas and hatreds and standards? What could you do
to help someone like him? Nothing that I could discover, lying
there awake in the moonlit darkness. And the Sergeant and Al.
What Homer had tried to pin on them seemed immensely unim-
portant, perhaps even touching. There were limits by which the
starved affection or even the starved sensuality of people should
not and could not be tested. Half asleep I seemed to see a balance.
On the one side were the Sergeant and Al, sweating their hearts
out to repair the radio transmitter so that Meyer had one chance
in a thousand of seeing his mother alive, and on the other was
the dead Jap shot in the back by Homer to sharpen his eye in
practice as a squirrel shooter. As I feE asleep one thought posed
itself in my fading consciousness that ignorance and the cruelty
arising from it were the most evil of all the evil manifestations
of man.

XIII Oakdale

ALTHOUGH i DID NOT BECOGNIZE MABY AT FIRST SIGHT THAT
day on the road, she knew me at once. This seemed odd because
in Crescent City she was a fairly mysterious and spectacular per-
son about whom people talked a great deal and whose very ap-

[214]

pearance on the streets caused people to turn and look and make
comments. On the other hand I myself was simply "Mr. Smith/*
a typical citizen, almost a kind o impersonal symbol.

She smiled and said, "Oh, hello, Wolcott! Thank God some-
body came along!"

I got down from the car and said, "You aren't hurt, are you?"

"No, at least I don't think so ... nothing that shows." She
was astonishingly calm to have just come through an upsetting
experience and one which might have been disastrous.

"Will you take me home?" she said. Til get someone to send
for the car."

That was the beginning as simple as that. There is always a
point in the relations between a man or a woman when one or
both can see what is coming, perhaps foresee the hurt or the
disaster that lies ahead, and turn aside before it is too late. Some-
times of course one senses the disaster and rushes toward it,
perhaps because the driving force of desire is so great that the
achievement of the end seems worth any misery or disaster, and
with some, I suppose, the unhappiness, the disaster, is of no
consequence because it is in reality a part of the whole and
complete experience. I can only speculate about these things
since of course I cannot answer for others and no one really
knows the heart of any other person. Certainly at that time I
was unaware of what was to happen, and even though I had
divined something of the unhappiness that was finally to come,
I might not have turned aside, for at that moment I was ready for
any experience, no matter what. Inwardly and secretly, in the
spirit, I was both sick and desperate. As for Mary, she may have
known all along. Certainly of the two she was the more expe-
rienced.

On the drive back to Mary's house we made the most conven-
tional and trivial conversation. I noticed only one thing once
or twice I found her regarding intently my profile, so intently
that I could feel her regard.

I had not been on the grounds of the big Victorian house for
more than twenty years and doubt that I had been even in Mary's

[ 215 ]

part of town more than once or twice since that time, and I was
surprised that the house and grounds had changed so little. The
neighborhood had become greatly altered and the near-by houses,
once more or less pretentious, had fallen upon shabby days and
turned into boarding houses and tourist '"homes/* but like an ex-
pensive luxurious island in a sea of shabbiness, the old house
stood proud and well kept. The iron grillwork of the tall barrier
which surrounded all the lawn and garden was freshly painted
with black paint. The same iron deer and dogs, freshly white-
washed, stood on the lawns among the ordered, circular, and
crescent-shaped beds of geraniums, kohlias, salvia, and lobelia.
The driveway must have been freshly raked only a little while
earlier, for there were no automobile tracks or even a footprint
on the blue-gray limestone gravel. The whole place was a mu-
seum piece out of the past.

As we drove under the great high porte-cochere Mary said,
^Better come in and have a cocktail/*

^Delighted," I said, shut off the motor, and followed her into
the great cross-hallway which led from the porte-cochere into
the main hall of the house.

At the foot of the great stairway the old desiie to slide down
the long wide rail returned to me and I spoke of it. Mary laughed
and said, "I used to think of it sometimes, but I never did any
sliding. There were never any children about to join in the
game. Sliding alone wouldn't have been much fun. The impulse
always died."

Then she raised her voice and called, "Nicole! Nicole!" and a
voice from above stairs answered, "Oui, cherie" and Mary called
again, "We have a visitor. Come down!" and then incongruously
the voice called back, "Okay. I'll be right down/*

Then Mary turned to me and said, 'Would you like to have a
look around? You remember the house. I haven't changed any-
thing,** and I became aware of the music which filled the whole
of the place. It seemed to pervade every room, coming from
some invisible source. It was pleasant music and I commented on
it and Mary said, "Yes. It's a ballet called 'Giselle/ Tm very
fond of the ballet. Do you like it?'*

[ 216 ]

"I've never seen a ballet," I said.

"No, I suppose you haven't. It's a great art/* and with that she
appeared to dismiss the whole subject.

It was true. She had changed nothing in the big old house.
There was the same old heavy furniture and the great gilded
baldachins capping the high windows with their curtains of red
velvet, the same marble-topped tables and consoles, and the
same thick heavy dark carpets which must have been renewed
since my day. It was as if she had sought to arrest the corroding
flight of time and change. The odd thing was that the furnishings
and the decorations which in my youth had been considered old-
fashioned and ugly and indeed I myself had considered them
so had somehow changed and were now beautiful. They had,
it is certain, a great look of richness and even dignity as compared
with the houses of my own world, all decorated in mud colors by
Mr. Banville, so alike that you could not tell them apart.

She said, "Do you like it this way?"

"Yes." And then Nicole came into the room.

She was a small thin dark woman with black hair in which
there was a streak of white. Her eyes were small and intensely
bright and intelligent. She moved in a small quick bird-like way,
like a song sparrow. I almost expected a flick of a tail. She might
have been forty or sixty. It was difficult to make a certain
estimate.

Mary said, 'This is Nicole Villon, a great friend of mine."

The little dark woman shook hands with me and said, "De-
lighted, Mr. Ferris/' She pronounced my name with a distinct
hiss at the end.

Mary said, "Tell Alexander Tm home and to bring the cock-
tail things to the veranda . . . and thanks a lot.**

When she had gone out Mary said, "Nicole is a very old friend.
She sometimes travels with me. She is part French and part
Rumanian. She is very clever. She writes for the French journals,"
and I was aware that Mary had sent Nicole for the cocktails
because she wanted time to explain her and I was also aware
that Nicole knew why she was sent out of the room and approved.

Then Mary led us to the veranda on the north side of the

[217]

house where it was cool. Here I discovered the only change.
The north veranda had been screened in and was furnished with
comfortable wicker furniture upholstered in bright-colored
chintz. From the veranda there was a wide view of the whole
of Crescent City. I had not seen this view for twenty years and
I was struck suddenly by how much the landscape had altered
during that time. Here and there rose the towers of new tall
buildings. The familiar roofs of whole streets of houses had
disappeared and in their place were the broad wide roofs and
sheds of factories and warehouses with the late afternoon sun
painting whole sheets of their windows the color of fresh blood.
The hills beyond the river, which once were covered with trees
and only a scattering of houses, were now bare of trees. Where
the virgin forest had been in my grandfathe/s time there were
rows of streets lined with houses all exactly alike. The change
had been going on steadily and so gradually that I had not
noticed the complete transformation until now when I saw it
all at once from the same angle after almost a generation.

It was no longer the town it had been in my grandfather's day
or even the town it had been in my own boyhood. This town
which I saw from the veranda of Mary's house, this town in
which I had spent the whole of my life, was a stranger. It was
not even a town but a great city in which, in a way, all of us
were lost. It was quite beyond control, spreading out, crossing
the river, climbing the once wooded hills on the far side, grow-
ing here, dying and rotting there, but it was a living thing
possessed of a colossal vitality. It had neither remained static nor
had it begun to die. It was possessed of an empty dynamism
which forced it to grow and change but without order or direction
in a kind of cancerous fashion in the midst of the once rural,
almost primitive landscape. And somewhere in the midst of it
I, and many others like me, was lost and confused, belonging
neither to the old strong dominant generations which had
cleared the way out of a desert wilderness nor to a new genera-
tion which might, if God willed it, dominate and channel and
bring to real fruitfulness all the violent and dynamic forces which

[218 ]

were loose, growing, expanding, spreading aimlessly like the
growth of a cancer, a growth which did not know where it was
going, unguided by any ideal or philosophy save that of bigness
and speed and material wealth. Perhaps it was more like a plant
growing on an unbalanced diet, rapidly and aimlessly until at
last, without order or support, it collapsed to earth once more.

I had had enough to drink not to mind standing there in silence
looking at the 'spectacle, permitting my soft, ambitious, undis-
ciplined mind to wander and to speculate. All this and the things
which had grown out of it were a long way from the day of my
two immediate grandfathers. How in such a world was a man
to be strong, to have character, to dominate his surroundings,
to find the way out for himself, his children, or his friends?
Suddenly it seemed like a tower of Babel which one day would
collapse because of its very pretentiousness and pride.

For a moment I fancied that I divined why Mary had kept
this immense and flamboyant old house exactly as it had always
been. It was a monument, a museum, a rock, past which had
swept the torrent of mediocrity and uniformity, a torrent of
ranch-type and bungalow houses, and picture windows and
scatter rugs and dull conforming minds, of universities like ant
heaps turning out clod-brained athletes and hordes of uneducated
and mediocre drones, and clubs and government bureaus and
do-gooding and taxes, worse than those of the ruined and decayed
Roman Empire.

Out of such a torrent no civilization was ever built, for it
was a torrent in which there was nothing of taste or individuality,
or respect for the mind or the spirit, or even ethics and morality,
in which even science was largely dedicated to destruction. In
some ways it was uglier than the rotting desert of the Dark Ages
when man lived again by his own wits and civilization, burning
with a brilliant enduring light, took refuge in monasteries and
fortified farms. In such a world there would at least be some
satisfaction. A man could be a man.

I heard Mary saying suddenly, "You're thinking how much it
has changed since we were children," and I started at the

[219 ]

fashion in which she had read my thoughts. It was a trick she
had, as I was to learn later on.

"It's almost unbelievable/' I said. Td never noticed it before."

"I would notice it more than you because I'm away for at least
half the time. I could keep this place as it was, but I couldn't
control the whole of the city."

Suddenly I asked, "Do you like it here?"

She smiled. "I don't really know. I needn't tell you why I have
to come back. Everybody knows why. That makes a difference.
If I came back by choice I'd probably like it more ... or perhaps
I wouldn't come back at all. I don't really know. I like it because
my father loved it here in this house/'

She moved to the table as Nicole returned followed by Alex-
ander, an ancient colored servant from her father's day, who
came in bringing ice and glasses and the things for making
martinis. She looked at me with a quizzical look. "I suppose that
surprises you. Most people never thought of him as liking Crescent
City and particularly this house, but he did. He loved it much
more than my mother. He didn't go out much., but he had some
very good friends in the town and he was always happy here.
My mother was restless and trivial. If there were not crowds
of people about her she was lost. He said once that our life in
Europe made this place seem more attractive and that each time
he came here it made him value more the life we had over there.
He was a very civilized man and because he was very rich he
could devote all his time to being civilized. I suppose he was a
land of parasite in his way. It's because of him I've kept this
place exactly as it was. Even the books in his library are in the
same order they were in on the day he died."

Then she laughed. 'Well, well. That was a long speech, but
I thought I'd explain. I know a lot of people in Crescent City
think Tm a good deal of a mystery or a little crazy. It's only that
this is a good place to rest."

She started to mix the martinis and almost at once Nicole
began to chatter, very rapidly like a bird, about the heat, about
the countryside and the beauties of the road along the river.

[ 220 ]

"It's as beautiful as any river in the world and the farms are so
rich and prosperous. The houses and the barns are different, but
otherwise the country is like the Valois en France"

Mary said, "Nicole is writing a book of poems called Paysagesl
It is about the difference and likeness of landscapes the world
over/'

I started to express my doubts that such a book would have a
big public and then checked myself.

The martinis were made and Mary passed them. An unex-
pected animation seemed to have come over her. Her eyes seemed
brighter and there was more color in her face. I made an effort
to help her with the cocktails, but she said, "No, I like waiting
on people. Sit still and relax. I don't imagine you have much
opportunity in Crescent City. Everybody is always running
about."

When she sat down I noticed that she did not take a cocktail
but poured herself a glass of sherry. She said, "111 tell you some-
thing, but it's a secret. My lawyers are trying to break the con-
ditions concerning the estate which force me to spend half of
every year here. I don't know whether they'll succeed or not and
I don't suppose it would make much difference in the way I live.
I'd still keep the house the way it is and Td probably come back
just the same. Legally I can still go about and visit friends while
I'm here. But I hate the idea of being pinned down to something/'

"How right you are, cherie" said Nicole. "Don't you think so,
Mr. Ferris?"

The martini had acted quickly on top of all the whisky I had
had at the club and the feeling of strangeness began to go away.
I think the presence of Nicole had something to do with the
change as well. She was so completely trivial and friendly and
imshy.

The music inside the house continued softly, and in the fading
twilight the view over the familiar city which in the full sun had
been sharp and garish and ugly began to soften and take on a
dull color as the cool of the evening chilled the mist arising
from the river so that it hung low, blurring and softening the

[221 ]

harsh outlines of factories and warehouses and shabby houses.
Across the river the coke ovens and blast furnaces were turning
slowly from black and sooty ugliness into a kind of glowing
illuminated beauty. I had another martini and then another and
another until I was feeling very well indeed. My tongue was
loosened, and although I do not remember what it was we talked
about, we must have talked a great deal. I remember that some-
thing happened which made us no longer strangers and I remem-
ber that I began to feel a growing confidence in myself, perhaps
because I did not seem a bore to two women of so much experi-
ence and knowledge of the world.

Once Mary said, "Oh, my God! IVe forgotten all about the
car! Ill go and tell Alexander to call about it. Ill be back in a
moment"

When she had gone Nicole said, "She is a charming woman,
Mary/* and I answered, <e Yes. We haven't seen each other for a
long time. It was almost like two strangers meeting/ 7

'Very warm in personality she is/* said Nicole, "and impetuous.
We're very old friends. We've seen a great deal together."

It was odd that in describing Mary she should use two words
that would never have occurred to me in connection with her.
But perhaps she was right. I had never really known Mary at all
and certainly she seemed friendly enough on this occasion. Cer-
tainly the Mary I had encountered on the road was a very
different person from the shy, rather plump girl I had known so
casually a long time ago.

When Mary returned she said, *Why don't you stay to dinner?
There's only Nicole and myself. We'd love it."

'Thanks, it's already past my dinner hour and I haven't even
called home."

I wanted to stay but something restrained me. I think perhaps
it was the feeling that I didn't quite belong as yet. I knew that
at home Enid and the children would probably already have
finished dinner. I was not particularly concerned about this
because since our open quarrel I had told her that if I did not
arrive home at the expected hour she should not wait for me,

[ 222 ]

and she had been forced to accept the arrangement since I
really did not care whether she accepted it or not.

Then Mary said, "I dislike being personal, but did it ever occur
to you, Wolcott, that you have remarkably beautiful hands?"

I laughed. "I've never thought about it one way or the other.
I just thought of them as hands." I was suddenly embarrassed as
I have always been when I am paid a compliment, especially if
the compliment conies from a woman. She moved forward a little
in her chair and leaned toward me. "May I look at them?"

I extended my hands palms upward, still embarrassed and
uncertain. She said, "No, one at a time. Your right hand first/*
and laughing she said, "I'm interested in palmistry." Her eyes
seemed suddenly very bright and her habitual rather quiet
manner seemed completely changed although she had taken only
part of the sherry in her glass.

As she leaned toward me the blouse of thin transparent stuff
fell away from her body and I was aware that she had very
beautiful breasts. Then as she took my hand in both hers some-
thing happened which was the beginning of everything. Her
hands were small and beautifully kept and warm and how shall
I describe it? vibrant, I suppose, to use a banal word, and on
contact with them a kind of current ran through the whole of
my body and something inside me said, "Here's your chance!
Here's experience! Here's everything! Here's escape! Now some-
thing may happen to you."

She squeezed the palm gently and said, "Look, Nicole! It's an
interesting hand!" She looked up at me very frankly and in the
friendliest way. "It's a tortured hand," she said, looking directly
at me. "What is it that tortures you?"

"I don't know/' I said "I didn't know that I was tortured,"
but I confess that I was a little scared and uneasy. I felt the
color coming into my face and found myself avoiding her gaze.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

"I suppose as happy as anybody."

Then she laughed in an excited way. "In any case it's none of

[ 223 ]

my business. Let's forget it. Have one more for the road/* She
dropped my hand quickly and rose to make a final cocktail.

"I must say/' she said, "that my accident was really very lucky.
This has been a pleasant couple of hours. We must do it again."

There's nothing Yd like better/' I said with the sudden bold-
ness of alcohol. "Whenever you like. How about tomorrow?'*

"Fine/* she said, pouring the one for the road.

"About the same time?"

"Okay. It's been great fun for Nicole and me. We don't see
many people. Nicole works and I do a great deal of reading
when we aren't in Virginia or Kentucky."

A little later she said, "You must have noticed me staring at
you this afternoon driving home."

"Yes," I said. "I did notice it"

"It was for a special reason. It struck me suddenly how much
you looked like my father. I never noticed it before, but of
course I hardly knew you at all and when you were younger
your face was softer. It's sharpened now and the likeness is
really extraordinary. Do you notice it, Nicole? In the throat and
in the sharp clean angle of the jaw and chin . . . like the Sargent
portrait in the house in the Rue de la Pompe/*

"Yes/* said Nicole. "Extraordinaire . . . mme le nez"

Then Mary rose quickly and said, "Wait, I'll fetch a picture
of him. You probably don't remember him very well."

I confessed that I did not. In my memory there was no image
of him at all.

She came back in a moment with a photograph of the Sargent,
a painting which must have been done of her father when he
was about my age. The painter had given his subject a certain
dash which the man may or may not have had. The head was
turned a little to the right with the chin tilted a little as if in
pride. In the picture the man was certainly handsome, more
handsome, I am sure, than I have ever been. I knew my own
face from shaving (God knows only too well that was what
started all the trouble), and I had seen it a thousand times from
just the angle shown in the picture with the chin tilted a little

[ 224 ]

so as to shave clean that part of me where the line of the throat
joined that of the jaw. I saw what she meant. There was a
marked likeness. The man in the picture wore rather long and
romantic sideburns.

I said, "I see what you mean. But your father was a much
handsomer man."

"Not really/* said Mary. "Sargent always made his subjects
glorified everyone he painted. He even made my mother seem
pretty even distinguished although she had no distinction/*
And after a moment she said, glancing from me to the picture
and back again, "Really it is remarkable. The only difference is
the sideburns. If you wore them you would be exactly like the
portrait."

It did not seem to me that the likeness was quite that remark-
able, but she seemed so intent upon the point that I did not
press the argument.

Then somewhere in the depth of the house a bell rang. It
must have been a big bell and the sound was exactly like that of
the bell at Churchill Downs which means, "They're off!"

"You're sure you won't stay?" Mary said. Tm sure Alexander
has laid a place for you."

"Nb, I really can't"-

Something told me that it was better to leave. I was quite
drunk although probably I did not show it. I had need to pull
myself together and try to precipitate my confusion as a cloud
is precipitated into rain. Everything that had happened was so
wholly unexpected, so completely different from what I had
imagined, lazily and indifferently, on the way to the old house,
would be the experience of having a cocktail with Mary Raeburn.
I was aware that suddenly we seemed very old friends and that
there was even a feeling of warmth between us, but I did not
know why, and with that coldness and clarity of thought which
has always stuck by me even after much drink, and with the
caution which has dominated the whole of my life, I thought
that perhaps after the martinis I had simply imagined all of

[225]

these tilings and had better sober up a little before progressing
any farther.

I rose and said, "Fve had a lovely time. If you expect me
tomorrow IT1 be here/'

Mary laughed. <c Of course we expect you!"

"Bien sur" said Nicole.

They both walked with me through the long hall to the porte-
cochere and Mary said again, "It's been great fun/* and then
Alexander appeared and said, "Telephone, Miss Mary. It's long-
distance from Warrenton. They're holding it"

"Good-by," said Mary and turned to follow him, but Nicole
remained behind. As I stepped into my car she said, "You've
been verree good for Mary. She doesn't see enough people. She
doesn't like enough people. But with you . . . She likes you."

Then I drove off, still in a kind of fog, aware that something
had happened of the greatest importance although I did not
quite know what it was.

I did not go home, for I did not want to see Enid both because
I felt I had had enough alcohol either to put me at a disadvantage
with her or to precipitate a quarrel and because I wanted to
clear my head a little, so I turned toward the road to Williams-
port along the river. I thought, "To hell with Enid!'* and at the
same time I was aware that such an attitude was dangerous, for
it always gave her the advantage over me in all her calculations.

I write about this in great detail as I remember it because it
was the beginning of something that was at once the most won-
derful and the most wretched period of my life, and everything
about it seems to be etched in my memory like the lines on
copper plate. The unhappiness with Enid was a dull and boring
kind of misery which by now is almost wholly erased from my
memory, especially since I have transferred much of it from my
heart onto paper and so purged myself of it, but this other
experience involves pain and a humiliation almost brilliant in its
clarity, to which I cling as if I could not bear to give it up.

Even now I can remember small and insignificant things which
occurred during that first meeting and in all the*meetings which

[ 226 ]

followed the way she held her sherry glass and the way,
toward the end of that afternoon when one blond lock detached
itself and fell across her face until she thrust it back again into
place, and a certain breathlessness which I had never expected
in her and which excited me. And remember, in my mind there
were no longer any inhibitions. I did not care what happened and
I felt no responsibility toward anyone.

As I drove along the river the night air grew steadily cooler
and presently I felt almost sober again and began examining
carefully, detail by detail, what had happened and, because I
was able to recreate everything with great clarity and the utmost
sense of reality, I began to understand that it had all happened
as it seemed to have happened and that nothing of it was an
illusion born of alcohol. It really did happen and it had meaning.
What it meant was that if things went weE I could have Mary
Raeburn and indeed that she could have me and that perhaps
this would be a good thing for both. I remembered what she had
said about the hand being that of a tortured person.

"Now," I thought, "is my chance!"

I was aware that for a moment I seemed to have entered again
that distant glowing half-forgotten world of Frank Saunders and
his family, yet it was not the same. They were both worlds in
which people moved about, it seemed, on a different plane and
with a freedom and ease which was strange yet pleasurable, a
world in which the barriers and inhibitions, the limitations, the
vulgar incessant concern with small things did not seem to exist
On this plane Mary and I had moved quickly and directly toward
each otter in the short space of a few hours. Yet I was aware of a
difference between the world of Mary and the world of Frank
which I could neither pin down nor understand.

I do not know whether at that moment I was in love with Mary
or not. Certainly I was aware of a strong physical attraction and
I was aware with a sensation of surprise and almost of shock
that Mary was not at all what I had believed her to be, if indeed
I had believed her to be anything at all, one way or another.
It was not that she had thrown herself at my head, but I knew

[227]

that if I chose I could have her and I knew even then that this
was what she wanted and that she knew I was aware of her
willingness. There had not been a word or even a gesture that
could be interpreted as an invitation, yet we both knew. Those
who have fallen in love at a mature age will understand what
I mean.

The figure of Nicole disturbed me vaguely. Why was she
there? Who was she? Her foreignness and the alien quality not
only of her speech but of her manner and behavior seemed to
envelop her in mystery. To be sure, I had never met a woman
anything like her. She seemed unobtrusive and at times almost
servile in her eagerness to agree with every opinion of Mary's.
Apparently she was a friend and an equal, yet she seemed also
to be a kind of servant to whom Mary gave orders.

Once during the drive home I experienced a sudden shadow
of doubt and an impulse to withdraw from the whole thing while
it was still possible, and I might have done so but for the belief
that here was my chance to escape both in flesh and in spirit
and that it might be my last chance. It was the only time doubt
occurred until the very end of the affair.

I had had that earlier chance, long ago in ray youth, when
Frank Saunders had opened the door for a moment on a new and
dazzling world and then closed it ruthlessly in my face. This
chance was different, for it involved desire and the flesh which
cannot quickly and ruthlessly be cast aside, which once the
flame is lighted cannot be extinguished until at last desire is
satisfied or burnt out. I was calculating enough to understand
that in the case of Mary, once my foot was in the door, it must
remain there for a least a little time. In the earlier experience
the flesh was not involved except vaguely perhaps in the shadows
of Frank's consciousness and of my own, in that realm in wijich
we could not and would not at that age recognize or even admit
the truth, although I think the flesh was the only explanation of
the fashion in which he took me up quickly and warmly and
apparently without reason and then abandoned me as if he
understood that what he thought was friendship was not friend-

[ 228 ]

ship at all but only a sudden emotional mistake and one which
troubled him deeply.

Once I stopped at a roadhouse for a drink and by the time I
arrived home it was after midnight. I put the car in the garage
and went to the icebox and ate half a chicken I found there,
knowing that in the morning I should hear complaints from Enid
that I had upset the whole of her week's planning and budgeting.
She must have heard me close the garage door but she did not
appear. I did not care one way or another. On the drive back
from Williamsport I had made my decision. Between Enid and
me everything I knew now was finished. We might speak to
each other in a civil fashion for the sake of the children, but
beyond that there would not even be conversation.

In the morning Enid had breakfast with me as always.
She seemed to be remarkably cheerful and talkative and more
than usually filled with plans for redoing the living room, for
putting a bird bath in the garden near the dogwoods. ( She was
never one of those who was willing to leave nature in peace. She
was always for putting in concrete paths and garden globes and
special benches she had seen advertised in some "home planning"
magazine.)

She asked, "Did you have a good time last night?"

*Yes," I said, and easy as anything added, "Some of us went
up to Williamsport bowling.''

She poured me another cup of coffee and said, *Tve been
thinking over what you said once . . . about being more free,
about doing things on your own occasionally. I think you were
quite right. That's the trouble with a lot of our friends. I've come
to believe there is such a thing as being too devoted. It can be-
come morbid."

"Yes," I said without much interest. Tm sure of that."

*1 want you to feel as free as free, darling."

And then looking up from my paper I caught her watching me,
and out of long experience I knew that she understood at last that
she had lost me and she could not understand how it had hap-
pened and was trying a new tactic of throwing my freedom at my

[ 229 ]

head. Probably she had read such advice in one of the modern
psychiatry columns that were beginning to appear in the papers.
("All men are really boys at heart and want to think that they
are free. This is something that it is easy for any clever wife
to accomplish. Once a husband thinks he has his freedom he will
want to stay at home every night.")

I tihought, "Oh, yeah!"

"Will you be home for dinner tonight?" she asked. "I don't
mind. If you won't be 111 just have a simple meal for me and
the children."

"You know it's the monthly meeting of the Chamber/* I said.
"Ill just have dinner downtown and be home right after the
meeting." She didn't of course know that it was the night of the
monthly meeting, but it did happen to be and it came into my
head as an inspiration.

"Okay," she said. "The children and I will just have a pick-up
meal. Don't hurry to come home afterward. If you're not in early
111 just go to bed."

She was overdoing the freedom idea, thrusting it down my
throat, forcing me to see how/r ee she was permitting me to be,
exaggerating it, rubbing my nose in it. It struck me that she was
never able to let anything alone. She had to work at it, organize
it, exploit it as if it were the Parent-Teacher Association or the
League of Women Voters. Why were so many American women
like that? What was the matter with them? What in hell weren't
they getting and what did they want? Why couldn't they simply
relax and be women?

I thought, "Okay, if you're going to force freedom down my
throat it will make much easier what I am going to do."

What made American women think so much about "holding"
their husbands or "winning them back" after they had lost them?
It made everything, every relationship, seem phony and involved
and tiresome.

I hurriedly finished my coffee before the children went off to
school not because I had a bad conscience but simply because I
did not want to be left alone with Enid to kiss me as if nothing

[ 230 ]

had happened between us, to have her bring me my hat and stand
watching me in the doorway when I got out the car and drove
off. I simply wanted to be left alone. I simply wanted her not
to bother me, not to go on assuming and indeed imposing on me
the illusion that these small acts gave me any pleasure. I think
I would have minded much less a nagging wife than one who
behaved like Enid.

All day at the office and even at lunch with the boys I kept
thinking of Mary Raebum. Again and again I lived through all
that had happened the evening before until I no longer doubted
what lay ahead of both of us* I no longer had any doubts that
she had made the way clear, and the more I considered the
whole affair, the more desirable it seemed to be. And suddenly
I realized that something wonderful had happened to me. I was
no longer bored. There was something I wanted to do, some-
thing in which I was interested. It was like being very young
again, almost like being born. There was at last an interest in my
life. There was something I wanted to do.

In order not to appear too eager and arrive at Mary's house too
soon I stopped at the hotel bar and had a couple of drinks with
the boys. It was the first time in months, even years, when I
enjoyed a drink instead of drinking mechanically to raise my
spirits. It was after six o'clock when I drove through the big iron
gateway of the big house and up the driveway which again had
been freshly raked with no sign of a track or a footprint on it.
It occurred to me that the place was like the palace of the sleep-
ing beauty.

As I drove into the porte-cochere she was standing there,
dressed in a lot of soft green stuff that trailed on the floor, with
a curious high collar that gave her an old-fashioned look as if
she were a ghost who had lingered on from the time when the
house was new.

She said, "Hello! I'd been waiting for you."

I parked the car, and as I came up the steps and joined her
she thrust her arm through mine and said, Tve got a perfect
martini waiting for you and Hazel has got a wonderful dinner.

[231 ]

I told her eight o'clock so we wouldn't have to hurry/* and almost
coquettishly she added, "You're late."

The whole greeting may have been impulse or it may have
been calculated, but the effect was not only sympathetic and
warm but it skipped, as you might say, a lot of ground. It was
as if we had known each other intimately for a long time or had
been seeing each other constantly. Only an experienced woman,
I think, could have conceived and contrived the whole thing.
With one gesture she had taken me wholly into her world. My
only doubt arose from the knowledge that once before it had
happened like this with Frank and his family.

I noticed that since yesterday there were flowers in the house,
huge bouquets of mixed flowers out of the garden for which she
kept a gardener the year round. They were not simply like stuffy
bouquets of zinnias or marigolds or garden-club flower arrange-
ments; they were great flamboyant bouquets made up of huge
dahlias and second-flowering delphinium and day lilies and
gladioli, opulent, rich, and on scale with the size of the big
rooms and the great height of the ceilings. They had, like the
flowers which Frank's mother had arranged long ago, an archi-
tectural quality.

The house was filled again with music which seemed to be
in every room.

On the veranda Nicole was sitting, dressed all in black lace
with a lot of loose crimson lacy stuff wrapped about her throat.
She wore tiny diamonds in her ears and looked even more
foreign than she had looked the day before.

I think it was at dinner that I divined for the first time a hint
of the unreality, even of the fantasy in which later I was to
lose myself almost completely for a time.

The table was laid out much as it had been at that single
dinner Mary's mother had given long ago in a feeble, rather
muddled effort to bring her daughter closer to the young people
of the town. The huge mahogany table carried a heavy old-
fashioned silver epergne with many small compartments filled
with flowers and fruit. And there were many silver dishes and

[ 232 ]

two enormous silver candelabra with, candles which threw the
great height and size of the room into the shadows. We sat at
one end o the table and were waited uppn by old Alexander.

The dinner was excellent and as always there was music
coming from some distant part of the big house.

I remember that I had a curious impression for an instant of
having gone backward in time to another period, another perhaps
happier if more ignorant and stupid time in my life. Even the
dresses that Mary and Nicole Villon wore seemed to fit into this
return into the past or at least- they seemed tuneless. Certainly
Crescent City and Oakdale seemed immensely and pleasantly
remote and even unreal.

I do not remember the conversation at dinner. What I remem-
ber most clearly was that the effect of cocktails followed by an
excellent dinner with two kinds of wine and brandy brought
on not the sense of depression which attacked me frequently
enough when I had been drinking heavily but a sense of dream-
iness and relaxation and contentment something that was
unaccustomed in my life. It was more and more as if the outside
world had vanished, as if by some enchantment I had been
transported backward into some more leisurely, pleasant time.
What I did not comprehend was that the illusion was created
very largely through money . . . and wealth, in such proportions
as to be almost incomprehensible even to a prosperous fellow
like myself. Out of money Mary had attempted to create a world
as she would have liked it, and in a way she had succeeded. But
money or not, it was extremely agreeable.

We had the brandy together with coffee on the big screened
veranda, and by the time we were seated there again, the sum-
mer sun had sunk across the river and in the dark moonless night,
soft and black as velvet, the fires of the blast furnaces and the
coke ovens lighted the whole of the sky along the flat land across
the river and high on the hills of the opposite shore. By night
the city was a bejeweled and magical place with a canopy of
crimson on the reflected clouds overhead. The old man, Mary's
grandfather, had done well to build his house on this hill. When

[ 233 ]

the house was new the view must have been wild and romantic
with the river boats coming up from New Orleans and the barges
slipping downstream with the current against the forested hills
opposite. It was all changed now; the beauty was equally wild
but different, far more savage than the beauty of the original
wilderness.

Mary said, "I wonder what would have happened if things had
been different ... if this had really been my home instead of
just a town where I visited ... if , for example, we had married
each other/'

I laughed. "If s something to think about/ 7

"Quel romanticisme" said Nicole. She had brought a piece of
fine tapestry and was working on It as she sat without speaking.

"I used to think you were very good-looking when you were
a boy in the twenties. 3 " She laughed. "I never told you that . . .
but I liked your hair and your blue eyes and your high color.
You always looked so clean."

"I hope I still do /*

*TTou still do. My father liked you too. I think he'd have been
pleased if we had got married. But in those days I was shy. I
never really knew anybody very well here. When I had to go out
and compete with the other girls it was agony."

I laughed again. "It was hard to get to know you, I never
knew what to talk about. I always thought you considered us a
bunch of hicks, and anyway if I'd tried to get acquainted with
you people would have said. There's that Ferris boy, trying to
many Mary for her money. Probably his mother is behind it/ I
was just as sny as you were/'

"It might have been different save for my mother/' said Mary.
"I never really liked her and I don't think she liked me. She was
a rather silly woman who chattered a great deal and never said
anything. There were times when she drove my father crazy. And
she couldn't bear to be alone. It didn't matter what kind of
company surrounded her so long as someone was there to be
talked at. Words just came out of her mouth without any thought
behind them. Sometimes she was ludicrous, and she never learned
that very often people were laughing at her rather than with her

[ 234 ]

and this ignorance only incited lier to more of the same silly talk.
She always thought that she was having a great success. I think
it was so because at heart she was supremely selfish. Everything,
even the weather, was referred to her own ego and whether it
pleased her or not. Needless to say, she dressed very fussily and
extravagantly without taste. She was so feminine that she became
nauseating in her clothes, her manner, her self-confidence. For
some time before he died my father scarcely talked with her at
all. He was polite and answered her but avoided her company.
She disliked me because as a child I was rather dumpy and
never suited the lacy ribbony things in which she insisted on
dressing me. The moment anyone came into a room when both
of us were present, she at once began operating on me straight-
ening my dresses, tucking up my hair, rubbing smudge spots from
my face with a lacy perfumed handkerchief. She always used
the same perfume, rather heavy and sickening. It pervaded every-
thing and hung in the room long after she had left it. I doubt
that it's manufactured any more, but now and then I get a whiff
of something which smells like it and suddenly I am sickened.
Once or twice I have actually been sick." She lighted a cigarette
and looked out over the glowing city. "You see/' she added, "I
really hated her. As a child I didn't know it because a child living
as closely as I did with my parents, traveling with them every-
where, never having any close friends among other children . . .
a child like that thinks the whole world is made up of people
like his mother and father. I must have been a young woman
before I discovered that all men were not like my father and all
women not like my mother. But the experience made me dislike
women. I have never been able to get on with them. I really hated
my mother, but I didn't know it until I was nearly grown."

It was a very long speech and I wondered at the time why she
made it. She was very quiet while she talked, as if she were
very tired. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. Nicole
went on working on her embroidery without looking up, perhaps
because all of this was something the two women had discussed
before many times.

I felt that I must say something so I said, TEtfs funny how

[ 235 ]

things happening in your childhood affect all the rest of your
life."

She turned toward me, and for the first time I saw that some
of the beauty which was in her eyes was the beauty of suffering.
She said, "I know the girls here in town thought I had a
wonderful life with all the money and the travel and Europe and
New York They envied me, but I'd have traded places then,
and even now, with any of them. I was always lost and lonely, I
never had any real home or any real roots. I just drifted about
the world in luxury and I was about as shy and lonely as it was
possible to be/' She laughed again and a curious edge of hard-
ness came into her voice. TBut I learned to get over that. I
learned the hard way by forcing myself. There are a lot of
American women like me wandering around in Europe and in the
East . . . the daughters of the second and third generations of
great wealth who don't belong anywhere. They're the most
unhappy people on earth. YouVe never asked me, but I know
you've wondered like everybody else in the town why I keep
this big house and spend so much money on it. It's because I'm
still trying to grow roots and because the whole place is asso-
ciated with my father whom I loved. When he died it was the
worst thing that ever happened to me or that can ever happen.
I got married at once because it seemed the only thing to do.
And that was a mess. My God! What a mess! Herby was a
suitable conventional man, not too bad in his way, but I scared
him. In spite of the fact that I had never had any experience
and only knew abolit sex through what Yd overheard as a child
in the general gossip about mistresses, I scared him."

Suddenly she laughed. "It all makes me think of a story which
happened to a Frenchwoman I know ... a widow who married
a second time at thirty-five a very handsome and desirable
Englishman. Everyone thought the marriage ideal and believed
her very fortunate, but after six months she appeared to be
unhappy and looked very badly. Outwardly no one could see
any reason for it. The husband was charming, considerate of
her, and very much in love. At the end of a year a Frenchman, a

[ 236 ]

cousin who had grown up with her, knew her very well, and
loved her very much and was an experienced man, went to her
and asked her to tell him franldy what the trouble was. She
answered him quite as honestly. There was no physical satisfac-
tion in her relation with her husband. He behaved as if the act
were shameful and to be gotten over as rapidly as possible. Yet
he was constantly driven to it.

"Forgive me for being so long-winded, but it's a good story
with a great deal of significance. The French cousin approached
the husband tactfully and suggested that he might give greater
satisfaction, but the husband appeared bewildered and the
Frenchman suggested that it might be a good thing for the
husband to take a course in love-making. He even volunteered
to provide the instructress an attractive and experienced actress
and courtesan of the better sort living in Paris. The ironic part
of the story is that the English husband accepted the offer, in
reality, because he loved his own wife so much and wanted to
make her happy. He went to Paris on occasional visits and at
length completed the course and was given a diploma for pro-
ficiency by the actress. But after months nothing seemed to
change. The wife became more nervous and looked more and
more drawn and ill, and when the cousin questioned her she
told him that nothing had changed. It was all as bad as ever. So
the cousin again approached the husband, telling him that the
actress teacher had reported that he was charming, proficient,
and satisfactory, yet his education appeared to be of no benefit
to his wife who constantly grew more ill. Why, asked the cousin,
had the husband not put into practice what he had been taught?
But the husband only looked horrified and said, 'But, my dear
fellow, a gentleman doesn't do such things with his wif el* *

Again she laughed. "I have told it fable fashion/* she said, <tf but
it explains why my marriage didn't last very long and why my
husband was scared of me. He was a Harvard man and belonged
to the best clubs, but he wasn't quite bright, and very con-
ventional. There was never a chance of our being happily married
and there wasn't any use in going on with it."

[ 237 ]

Then suddenly Nicole picked up her embroidery and stood up
saying, "If you'E forgive me 111 go to bed. I've had a migraine
all day and it's worse than ever." Then she turned to Mary and
said, "Do you want to give me a moment to check over what
I'm to do in New York?"

Mary got up and said, "Of course/' and turning to me she said,
"111 only be five minutes. Nicole is going to New York in the
morning, probably before I'm awake. YouVe got everything
there on the table. Help yourself. I'll be back in a second.**

The two women went out. I poured myself another brandy
and lay back in the chair feeling relaxed, drowsy yet interested.
I wondered why she had been so talkative and why she had re-
vealed so much. There could only be one reason. I closed my
eyes and lay back on the chaise longue.

She was gone for a longer time than she had promised, and
when she returned I was not aware of her return until I felt the
touch of her hand running through my hair. I opened my eyes
and smiled at her saying, "Go on. That feels very pleasant/*

She in turn smiled but said nothing. Her eyes seemed very
brilliant and I knew then that both of us understood what it was
we wanted. Then as if the gesture had never occurred at aE
she turned away from me and poured herself a glass of sherry
and sat down.

"YouVe never told me anything about yourself/* she said.
"You're married and it seems to have lasted. Are you happy?"

I laughed. "As much as anybody is/' I said. "Like most people
I probably expected too much in the beginning. It didn't turn
out that way.**

"It seems to me that all of us are entitled to a share of happi-
ness, even if we have to fight for it. Otherwise the world is a
miserable gray place in which we just drag along until the end.**

That was it! I suddenly saw the three of us Mary and Enid
and myself each fighting for that little dole of happiness and
satisfaction, each of us isolated, each of us wanting the other to
conform to his terms. What was Enid*s happiness was certainly
not mine, nor mine hers. And Mary too probably wanted her

[ 238 ]

happiness on her own terms. I began to see why the whole
business of living must be a compromise, There might be
moments or hours or even days when that satisfaction was
achieved, but all the rest was compromise, a little here, a little
there, until the whole thing lost its shape and purpose. But that
was not what I wanted. I wanted the whole thing, as very clearly
did Mary.

We began talldng again about our childhoods and the past and
it seemed to me that we had known each other intimately for
much longer than a few hours. Perhaps, I thought, this is the
thing called "understanding each other" which people were
always talking about. And presently we found ourselves talking
about her grandfather, the old Titan who had built this house
which she cherished so carefully. Neither of us had ever known
him very well and only as children, but on both of us he had left
a tremendous memory and impression as dominant and forceful
personalities do upon children. He had been shrewd and fore-
sighted and sometimes extravagant but only in solid and material
things which in the end paid him back for his extravagance
things like this huge old house overlooking the river which had
become long ago a monument to his energy and wisdom that
was known from one end to the other of the great river valley.
In the old days it was pointed out on every river boat or barge
that passed up or downstream.

He had had fine horses and a whole array of fine carriages,
and when I spoke of them Mary said, "They're still there. They're
kept like a museum." She sat up suddenly. 'Would you like to
see them?"

So we went out across the lawn. It was very dark under the
great trees with only the distant light from the veranda to show
us the way. We followed a great hedge of lilacs until we came
to the courtyard of the stables, and there the lights from the
blast furnaces and coke ovens, reflected downward from the
low-lying clouds, illuminated the whole of the place. We crossed
the open space, she switched on a light by which I found the
key hanging on a nail and we went inside. There, ranged along

[ 239 ]

the wall, polished and with all the metal shining, hung the
harnesses of the horses long since dead, and on the floor itself
there was in truth a museum collection of carriages, dogcarts,
phaetons, cabriolets, an Irish jaunting cart, two governess* carts
made to be drawn by ponies 'and donkeys, and even a sporting
coach. They were all spotless and polished.

Mary seemed excited by the experience and even climbed into
several of the carriages, but for me the whole exhibition of
shining carriages was depressing, as depressing as the skeletons
of animals exhibited in a museum of natural history. They were
dead. They had no use. They belonged to another day.

"Once/* said Mary, "the pony ran away with the governess* cart
and dumped us all in a ditch. That's where I got the small scar
over my left eye/*

By now I knew what it was I wanted and that I wanted it now,
tonight. It was the first time I had ever felt an emotion so
strongly. The sensation was as much mental as physical. I could
not leave her without its being satisfied. She divined, I think, that
I was not much interested in the carriages and we left the place,
and as we crossed the courtyard again I saw that she had not
troubled to lift her long frock of flimsy stuff out of the dust.
She walked very quickly, and as we reached the veranda she
said. "While we're about it 111 show you my rooms upstairs.**

I said, *Tve never been upstairs in the house."

She said, *Tm rather fond of the place. IVe made a kind of nest
up there different from the rest of the house/'

I followed her up the long high red-carpeted stairs with the
heavy, polished balustrade, and at the top she turned to the left,
opened a tall door, and after I had gone through it she closed it
behind us and smiling at me she said, "Now?" and I took her in
my arms and kissed her. It was a violent kiss. Her whole body
was shaking. Her hands were tangled in my hair.

It was nearly daylight when I left. We agreed upon my
leaving while it was still dark because of the old servants and

[ 240 ]

because there was always a chance that someone might recognize
me or my car.

What happened in the room was Hke nothing that had ever
happened to me before. It was as if until then I had known
nothing whatever of lovemaking and certainly nothing of what
the response could be. It was beyond anything I had ever
imagined. It is quite impossible for me with my poor gifts as a
writer to put it on paper, even if I felt any desire to do so.

And now began a period of my life when, looking back upon
it from the solitude and objectivity of this beautiful and wretched
island, I seem to myself to be a stranger. It is very easy to see
myself quite as if I had been at that time another person. The
odd complex thing is that I like myself as I was then. I think I
must have been quite attractive, physically. I was not quite
forty, vigorous, with a good physique and at heart amiable if
tormented. There is even, I think, a certain amount of narcissism
in my feeling toward the stranger Wolcott Ferris of that brief
and isolated period. I am proud even now of the vitality and the
vigor I possessed in meeting the demands of Mary's curious
obsession for me. I could take it and did, at least to the moment
of the final break-up. How much longer I could have lasted
physically I do not know. But for the time being 1 was quite a
fellow.

I think that the real reason I seem a stranger is that for a time
I was released from all worry or thought concerning myself and
my life. I simply gave myself up to the whole thing. I became
reckless, so reckless that, thinking of it now, it seems to me that
it was all impossible and unbelievable. I slept marvelously well
and wakened feeling young and wholly restored each morning,
and I found that almost every hour of the day I was thinking of
Mary and what had happened and how soon I could be with
her again. Each moment away from her seemed wasted and lost.
It did not matter to me very profoundly whether we were found
out. My business ceased to be of any concern whatever, and it
was fortunate that it was the kind of business which managed
to run itself.

[241 ]

Certainly the people around me must liave noticed a difference
that I was exceptionally good-humored and full of bad jokes,
that in the office I was never ill-tempered and never criticized
anyone or anything, that I enjoyed people again and enjoyed
almost anything I did. Even conversation which had bored me
to the point of hysterical deafness seemed all at once rather
pleasant and agreeable.

And that brings us back again to what love is. I suppose this
was real amour which I experienced, the thing French novelists
write about better than any others, exploring it down to the
finest of details. But again what is amour but a different thing
for every individual, for every man and woman violently attracted
to each other? So many things enter into it background and
tradition and environment, the condition of one's feeling and
psychology at the moment, the so-called "chemical element of
attraction," the compensation of two temperaments, the biological
elements of glands and their stimulated activity which makes all
people in love (even the ugly and the lout) appear to glow with
an augmented vitality and even charm.

I had never thought of myself as especially passionate or
demanding or driven where sex was concerned. The experiences
I had had came about largely through boredom or the desire to
become utterly lost for a time, as in the adventure with the girl
in New Orleans who lived over the bakery shop. Now there was
the element of sensuality, in my case an aroused sensuality which
had never been touched during the mechanical embraces and
tricks of the women whom I had taken up casually.

All this and much more went into this relationship with Mary.
It was a powerful and overwhelming experience, and perhaps
it was just as well that when it all ended suddenly and with
violence I came out here to the South Pacific. Otherwise I might
have gone on searching recklessly for something to replace it,
something to carry along that sensation of lightness and delight
which was always with me, that renewed interest in everything
about me which I had known as a young man and which had
come to die slowly during all the years in Oakdale. Out here

[ 242 ]

there was nothing to explore, nothing to search for, with the
only women for hundreds of miles around those black and greasy
specimens with which Homer, the wool-hat, satisfies himself.

Probably such an adventure always seems unique to the man
who has experienced it. While it lasts and even long afterward
it must seem that this has never happened to any other man,
and probably it has never happened in exactly the same fashion.
But it is very likely something like it happens to many a man who
is middle-aged or on the verge of middle age, especially in a
world such as mine. It is doubtless the story of the preacher who
elopes with the choir singer, the story of the solid businessman
who suddenly abandons his wife and children and goes wild
with a model or a female acrobat, the story of the mature and
sedate lawyer who suddenly blasts the whole structure of his
life for a girl working in the filing department.

It is often enough, I suppose, the story of Mr. Smith. It was
different in my case only because Mary was very rich and
because she never wanted to marry me or anyone else. It was
different too in other ways which I did not understand -until the
very end, yet even then amour is compounded of so many things
that with other Smiths there may have been similar complex
psychological factors at once alike and different

Crudely the fact is that I felt an animal delight in everything
that was Mary, in the perfume she used which did not smeU
sweet and heavy like flowers but rather like a clean chemical, like
a fresh, unscented, and delightful odor of fine soap. The lipstick
which on Enid, and consequently with all other women, I
abhorred, became an exciting element where Mary was con-
cerned. Most of all perhaps was the fierce physical excitement
of her body seen always in darkness or a half light. Even now
the memory of it has a tremendous power to excite me, some-
times almost beyond endurance. There was nothing sentimental
or spiritual about that. It was direct and primitive, yet I know
that it was that which lent a kind of glow to every other element.
And of course there was her own recklessness . . . that she held
back nothing . . . nothing whatever to give me delight and satis-

[ 243 ]

faction. Oh, I can understand well enough why it is that men
at middle age and later suddenly throw all else recklessly to the
winds for the sake even of a single night. If you have not known
it there is no way of making you understand. It would not matter
even if death brought down the curtain at the coming of the
dawn.

For the first two weeks we saw each other every night in those
rooms she had made over for herself on the second floor of the
old house. At first I was so lost that I did not even see the rooms
or the furniture, but gradually my consciousness became aware
of the surroundings and I discovered that in all the house these
were the only rooms which she had not kept as they had been
in her father's time. They were furnished completely with the
most feminine of French furniture. In reality what she had
re-created there was, I suppose, the atmosphere of the boudoir
and bedroom of a demimondaine. I do not know what men or
how many men had been there before me, but it is unlikely that
any will ever follow me there because Mary succeeded in break-
ing the rules of the trust and is no longer forced to return to
Crescent City. There is a curious perverse satisfaction in such
knowledge, even out here in the islands removed in both time
and space from what happened there. I myself shall probably
never see the rooms or the house again, and probably it is much
better that way.

During much of those two weeks Nicole remained in New York.
The old servants lived in a far wing of the house, and although
they must have had suspicions when night after night I came
to dinner, they could not know what went on, afterward . . .
when each succeeding night we went at an earlier hour up the
big empty stairway to the cocotte's boudoir, until presently we
went there before dinner and returned again after we had had
our brandy.

As a concession, or more perhaps out of long habit and because
of the children, I returned each night to my own house an hour
or two before daylight. Apparently Enid was always asleep in
her own room, although when everything broke up I discovered
that she always knew the hour at which I came in.

[ 244 ]

I took to sleeping late and usually got up about around ten or
ten-thirty to find that at the sound of the footsteps overhead Enid
had got my breakfast under way. After the first three or four
times I came in late she no longer asked or even hinted for
information as to where I had been. I think she discovered that
I always had a quick lie ready for her., a lie which was difficult to
run to earth and expose. Also she was still practicing the sob
sister's advice of giving me my freedom until I was sick of it.
But of course this wasn't simply a matter of freedom. It was
infinitely more serious, and there was behind it all the years of
slow corroding irritation, appeasement, and even hatred on my
side which made the chances of my ever returning to her pos-
session for good wholly out of the question.

This of course was something she could never understand
since all heir life, her thoughts, her calculations were upon a plane
so false, so imaginary, so fictional that reality or truth could never
touch them. In her world husbands and wives "shared" every-
thing. Husbands were "lost" and "won back again." By the use
of a new perfume or a little more effort at dressing attractively
an erring husband could even be brought back to the conjugal
bed. It was all formula and tricks which never once touched the
tragic and passionate depths of reality or fact.

I sometimes think that during all this period she was at times
actually happy because she saw herself playing a game, as she
thought with great cleverness, bringing me back to submission
without my knowing it "the husband who after a fling always
comes back to the fireside." Even after the gossip got around and
people began talking I think she found satisfaction in the knowl-
edge or at least in her own conviction that other women were
saying, "Dear Enid, how well she is taking the whole thing!"

As I write it occurs to me that the whole of Enid's character
and existence, all her motives and calculations might well be
enclosed in quotation marks. And God knows that among Ameri-
can women she does not stand alone. It is a part of the whole
dullness and unreality and confusion created by advertising
hucksters and sob sisters and "he-man" novelists and preachers
and interior decorators and perfume manufacturers and radio

[245]

soap operas, as if a man could be tricked into or out of some-
tiling which is stronger than any of us and over which in the end
none of us but the unsexed or the weaklings have any control.
It is a vicarious, synthetic, and pitiful world, indeed perhaps a
whole civilization if it might be called that

There are plenty of other men who have been subjected to the
same maneuvers as those practiced by Enid and they will under-
stand how incredibly maddening such tactics can be. I will
never be sure that Enid herself was unaware of this and did not
get some satisfactions out of the maneuvers and the peculiar
torture they produced. She was always bright and cheerful,
almost too much so, when she brought in my breakfast in the
morning. Although the maid could have done it she never per-
mitted this. She brought it "with her own hands." In the old days
when I wanted desperately to read my newspaper undisturbed
she was always interrupting me with questions and comments,
but now she never interrupted me at all. She simply sat opposite
me with her "extra cup of coffee/' looking out of the window
cheerfully, sometimes even half humming a tune. A little later
she arranged it so that when I came downstairs the record
player was playing music which she knew I especially liked
(most of which I have never wanted to hear again). And when
I went to the garage for the car she stood on the porch smiling
and waving at me.

However rested and well I felt on waking up, my whole
mood was destroyed by the time I left the house. Fortunately
in my obsession the mood quickly vanished and I fell again to
thinking of Mary to the exclusion of all else.

Of course it was inevitable that gossip should find us out. We
had been lucky for a time in the fact that the big old house stood
in a part of town where people we knew seldom came and that
my car, parked there night after night, could not be seen from
the street. It is probable that somehow the old servants came
to talk, and once that pipeline was opened the news went quickly
through every kitchen and laundry in Oakdale and thence up-
stairs to the women who were to so great an extent Oakdale
itself. Who it was that tipped off Enid or when the revelation

[ 246 ]

occurred I have never known, but there was never at any point
any sign I could detect that she had discovered the whole of the
truth.

In the meanwhile in the background Nicole Villon played a
puzzling role. She remained in New York for several days, and
when she returned she had dinner with us in the evening and
then silently and without any explanation disappeared. Some-
times Mary went with her and was absent for a few moments.
Nicole seemed more than ever like a small bright-eyed bird who
came to dinner as a bird might come to a feeding shelf and then
vanished. She never gave the faintest outward sign of knowing
what was going on and none of us ever mentioned her trick
of disappearing immediately after dinner. Outwardly, so far as
the town was concerned, she served in a flimsy way as a "cover"
or a chaperone for Mary.

Her presence and her relationship to Mary I found more and
more puzzling. She seemed half friend and confidante and half
servant, and I did not believe the story that she was writing a
book of poetry. Presently I discovered that actually she also
performed the duties of a lady's maid. She it was who pressed
Mary's clothes and kept the rooms above stairs in order, yet
there were moments when she could be disagreeable and even
insolent to Mary. Obviously she had a good background with
her languages and her knowledge of art and of music. It was
Nicole who made the selections of the disks which kept the big
house filled with music constantly and she who operated the ex-
pensive gramophone concealed in a room beneath the great
stairway. Mary never took her anywhere in Crescent City and
few people had ever seen her.

I came presently to get the impression that she was jealous of
me or that she did not like me and that she talked against me to
Mary. It was a curious impression which I could not analyze or
justify, but when I suggested such a thing to Mary she only
laughed and said, <c You mustn't mind. It doesn't mean anything.
She is always jealous of anyone who comes close to me. It's
a very old story."

What puzzled me most was the bond between the two of

[247]

them. I could discover no reason for it save that, in traveling,
such a woman as Nicole, who served as a companion, friend,
secretary, and maid, might be useful. It is difficult to discover ,
now why I experienced this growing reaction of mistrust and
dislike of Nicole. There was nothing, no act, no insinuation, no
word to which you could pin the feeling and explain it. It was,
I think, a matter of instinct and intuition, of the male recognizing
an element of hostility in the female, not toward any given
individual but toward the whole of his sex. There are women
like that, women who would be accounted "normal" (whatever
that means) yet who experience and practice toward all men an
attitude of actual hostility, who see any act, however trivial,
of any man as a part of a general conspiracy against the whole
of the female sex. It is not that they are involved personally;
the whole thing is abstract, objective as you might say, "a matter
of principle." They are suspicious of all men, suspecting them of
calculated predation or at least of swindling and deceit. They
are the most annoying of women and, of all neurotic types, the
most unnatural.

Nicole was of that sort. The attitude may have been the result
of unhappy experience in the past, and Mary did tell me that
twice Nicole had been badly treated by men, once by a husband
and once by a lover. As a clinical type she was neither masculine
nor feminine but seemed wholly sexless small, brisk, thin, with
a quick if superficial intelligence.

I could not be rid of her. She was a third wheel in the affair,
never really present and yet always there in the background, as
if in some way she were an incarnation of fate, a symbol of the
whole affair and its eventual sterility. There was no question of
inducing Mary to be rid of her. When, after we had progressed
beyond the first violence of passion into a degree of intimacy,
I suggested that we, and especially myself, might be happier if
Nicole went back to Europe, leaving us wholly free, Mary only
laughed and said, "Don't be ridiculous. What difference does
she make to us? In reality she is not here at all. She doesn't object
to what we are doing. She hasn't even any interest in it and I

[248]

can't do without her. She takes care of a million small things/*

What troubled me most and what I suppose was nothing more
than jealousy was the knowledge that when" I was not with
Mary her company was shared almost entirely by Nicole. And
I felt that when they were together in the hours when I was
absent they talked of me and of the whole affair, although Mary
denied this when I once suggested my suspicion. I believed pas-
sionately that what went on between Mary and myself belonged
to us alone and should be kept thus. And there was too the feel-
ing, again wholly intuitive, that there was something at once
cold and unclean about Nicole and that even her presence in
some way defiled the whole of our relationship. In my obsession
I wanted to share Mary with no one, and so I fell into the same
error as Enid herself, consuming myself with a desire to absorb
and devour Mary in the delusion that one person can absorb
another. It is one of the greatest errors in love, whether it
happens in the love between husband and wife, lover and
mistress, or even mother and son. There is no such thing as com-
plete possession. It cannot happen, and inevitably one of the
partnership is hurt and in the end perhaps destroyed.

I know now that nothing could have been less possible with
Mary than the attempt to absorb her for she was above all else
independent. In a way she had a masculine mind and will within
the most feminine and desirable of bodies. She wanted freedom
and in the end she bought it, not only with all her money, but
through the sacrifice of many other things, until she arrived at
that point of instability which was her ruin.

It was, in other words, a nice mess in which I found myself
a rather simple, even naive, inexperienced American approaching
middle age. I saw and understood none of this until it was all
finished and I had been used to the point of satiety. I am still
trying to understand it all. It is possible that I shall never under-
stand it although Mary in that final letter did her best to make
me understand it at least her side of it.

In the end there arrived a point at which it became impossible
for us to carry on as we had been doing. Obviously I could not

[ 249 ]

go on forever visiting her each night and returning home in the
early morning in the face of the knowledge that by now almost
everyone shared* I knew how thoroughly the whole thing was
known, even by the way in which my friends and acquaintances
looked at me. I knew that every time I bought something in the
drug store the clerk knew why, that every time I ordered a drink
in a bar the bartender would conceal in his eyes the knowledge
he shared. I knew that every girl in my office watched me and
once my back was turned began talking to the nearest companion
about Mary and me. And there was always, I knew, the gossip
that I was planning in the end to become Mary's husband and
thus "feather my own nest."

But there was another element. Presently in our relationship
there emerged a desire to give a curious kind of permanence to
the affair, to make it in a way more "comfortable." And so we
evolved a more sensible plan. It was that Mary should go away
to stay in the East or in Virginia and that I should come there
to meet her over week ends or even for a day or two in the middle
of the week, and that is how it worked out. One concession I
did achieve that when I was with Mary, Nicole should be
sent away.

As it turned out, the arrangement was more satisfactory than
the old one because it meant that the old necessity for breaking
off before morning no longer existed. I could remain with her
as long as I liked. We could waken together, lazily, at any hour,
have breakfast together, and share our waking hours. Even
though it meant separation sometimes for several days, it was
better than the old way. Indeed I think the arrangement even
maintained our ardor and interest in each other at a higher pitch
because during the periods apart I could think of nothing but
the time when I should see her again. Each time we met it was
a renewal. I returned fresh and excited and ardent. It has oc-
curred to me that it might have continued thus for years had
not the final crisis put a sudden end to the whole thing.

Sometimes we met at a hotel in New York when we rarely
left the hotel bedroom-sitting room, and on several occasions

[250]

we met in hotels at resort places, and twice she took me with
her into the world of hunting and horses which she frequented
from time to time. It was a pleasant world but to me a strange
one in which people used what seemed almost a foreign tongue
and in which I always felt an inferior outsider. And it was in that
world that occurred the first warning, the first small spark of
suspicion and disillusionment.

We had been staying at the hotel in Lexington and moving in
a society which showed neither disapproval nor even very much
interest in an affair carried on so openly. As in the world of
Frank's family, these people had other interests. They regarded
the romantic goings-on of individuals as their own affair. It was
a long week end for us, from Thursday night to Tuesday morn-
ing, and on Saturday night, after the races, we went to the house
of a man called Stacy who had a big stable of horses.

There were people there from all over the country and even
from Europe, and I was both astonished and proud that nearly-
all of them seemed to know Mary and were glad to see her again.
But most of all it seemed to me that Mary became almost another
person. She appeared clever, gay, gregarious, and friendly. In.
the intensity of our relationship no one until now had ever come
into it no one save Nicole with her curious detached, almost
clinical relationship. And for me this was a dashing attractive
world in which everybody seemed to be a character. It was a
world in which I would have liked to live, and during the week
end I found myself calculating (for the first time since the affair
had begun) on how this could be done and arrived at the con-
clusion that there were only two ways. One was to cut all ties
with Crescent City and simply live and travel with Mary as her
lover. The other of course was to have Enid divorce me and
marry Mary, something which by now I divined would be
virtually impossible. Enid would never divorce me, and Mary
had a curious abhorrence of marriage, arising partly I think
from the marital history of her parents and partly out of experi-
ence with her husband.

There were perhaps forty people at the big Stacy house for

[251 ]

cocktails and dinner, and many of them by the time dinner was
served had had a great deal to drink.

At dinner Mary put me with two old friends of hers, a middle-
aged and very horsy woman and a handsome younger woman
who had come to dinner in jodhpurs and jacket. For me it was
a sticky and uncomfortable position for they talked across me
mostly of the ancestry, the build, and the records of horses,
going far back into the England of the eighteenth century. So
far as I was concerned they might have been talking Chinese, and
I felt a worm.

Mary sat between two men to whom she had introduced me
earlier, and because I was bored by my table companions and I
was jealous I watched the two men. One was a thin, hard-bitten
old man who must- have been seventy. The other was a big man
of perhaps my age, good-looking in a florid way with a very red
face and very black hair. He had the physical softness about him
that marks many a middle-aged heavy drinker, and from his
manner and the loudness of his laughter it was evident that he
had done very well by himself. It was clear that he found Mary
attractive and that his attentions were annoying her, for more
than once I observed her turn as if she would have moved away
from him had it been possible. Once I saw anger flash in her
blue eyes, and then presently I saw her excuse herself and go
away from the table. The man looked after her and then rose
and followed a little unsteadily.

I was aware of several things that Mary wanted to escape
from him, that he was obviously following her, and that my
course of action was to go to her rescue. I was aware too that I
must do this discreetly in order not to make the rescue evident
or to risk an unpleasant scene of some sort. Jealousy did not
enter into the picture, for it was clear that she wanted only to
rid herself of the man.

When I felt that I could do so discreetly I excused myself to
my two horsy companions and slipped away from the table,
going in the direction of the hallway through which Mary had
disappeared. It led, I discovered, to one of the huge verandas

[252 ]

which surrounded the house, and I followed the veranda to the
point where it turned a corner. The veranda where I stood was
dimly lighted. Further on it lay in darkness.

As I reached the corner I heard Mary's voice, very cold now,
saying, 'Well, you wanted to talk to me, Basil. What is it you
want to say?" and I hesitated, thinking that if he had followed
at Mary's invitation I had no right to intervene. And again any
jealousy I might have felt was extinguished by the peculiar
hardness of Mary's voice. It indicated that she hated the man.
I remained in case she might need help and Because I was
drawn by an almost ungovernable curiosity.

I heard the man called Basil say, "You know damned well
what I want to say. I want you to come home with me for an
hour."

Mary said, "That's all over and you know it. I'd as soon jump
in the lake as go home with you. That goes even if you were
sober. I sat with you at dinner to keep you quiet because you
were drunk. Now shut up and leave me in peace."

When he spoke again there was a nasty edge in his voice.
"I was good enough for you once - - , plenty good. What* s turned
you so nasty nice?"

I did not know whether to disappear or to intervene and if
necessary sock the fellow on the jaw. For the time being I was
paralyzed by indecision, and before I could move I heard him
say, "Good God! YouVe taken on anything even jockeys and
now you stick at me. YouVe slept with half the men at this
party . . ."

He did not finish the sentence, but I heard the sound of a
violent slap and cursing and I called out, "Mary! Mary!" and
came round the corner.

The man was standing still staring at her, and at the sound
of my voice Mary said, very quietly, "Get me out of here, Wolcott.
Don't hit him. It'll only make things much worse." And she took
my arm and fairly dragged me out of the darkness into the light.
Then the man began to laugh. It was a horrid mocking sound
and it followed us along the whole of the veranda.

[253 ]

Mary said quickly, "Go out and find the car. I'll meet you at
the door."

Still bewildered, I obeyed her tod in two minutes she was at
the door. We drove off in silence and Mary said suddenly, "Did
you hear what he said to me?"

"Some o it. I should have knocked him down/*

"No/* said Mary. "You're wrong there. He was drunk and it
would have made an awful scandal. IVe been trying to get rid
of him since six o'clock/*

I said, "Why didn't you call me earlier? I'd have got rid of
him."

"It wouldn't have done any good. He was drunk when he came
in. I stalled him off until it didn't work any longer." Then very
quietly she said, "He was in love with me once. I haven't seen
him for four years. He was drunk tonight and he's a cad anyway
even when he's sober."

I said weakly, "The whole thing makes me feel like a sap."

"You needn't feel that way. You behaved exactly as a gentle-
man should. If you had hit him it would have been much worse."

Then suddenly she seemed to collapse. She began to cry and
crumpled against my shoulder. I slowed down" the car, put one
arm about her and kissed her, and at that the sobbing only in-
creased.

Presently she said, "Don't pay any attention to me. I'll be over
it in a minute. I'm just tired . . . that's all ... so bloody, goddamn
tired. Just hang on to me, darling, till I come out of it."

I said nothing but kissed her and let her cry. But the sudden
collapse startled me. She had always seemed so confident and
sure of herself. She always seemed to have everything in life
under control, and now she was collapsed, crumpled and sob-
bing, and the anguish of her cry, *Tm so tired ... so bloody,
goddamn tired!" rang in my ears. It was a cry of real and terrible
anguish.

That night at the hotel a new element entered our relation-
ship, for it seemed that she had come to depend on me. She
became for that night and from then on softer and in a way more
feminine. It was also as if she had become suddenly younger,

[254]

at times almost like a child. Of all the countless times we made
love I think that night was the best of all, for we came that night
nearer to what the relationship between a man and a woman in
love should be.

It was, of course, a forewarning, a sort of first sounding of
the theme of doom in a symphony. In the next few meetings we
were both, I think, really happy, happier in the truest sense of
the word than we had ever been. I began to think of the whole
thing seriously for the first time as a permanent relationship
either with or without marriage, and I believe the thought oc-
curred as well to Mary, although we never discussed it. She
knew that there was small chance that any such thing could
happen, but she knew the reasons why this was so and I did not.

Four weeks later we met in Virginia at a country hotel. She
had been staying in the countryside with friends and Nicole was
in New York. Mary indeed had scarcely seen her since the ugly
incident at the party in Lexington. She met me in Washington
at the airfield and we drove impatiently to the village hotel,
only stopping on the way at the village post office because Mary
said she "was expecting a special delivery letter from New York.
She hurried into the post office and after a little time came out
looking irritated and nervous.

"Damn Nicole!" she said. "She was to have written me two days
ago about something important/*

She seemed in a bad temper which I managed to break down
by making love to her as soon as we reached the hotel and
hurried up to our rooms. Afterward she seemed calmer again,
but at six o'clock she insisted on driving down to the post office
to ask a second time for the letter, again with no success.

That evening we had dinner with some hunting people, and
immediately after dinner Mary said, "Do you mind taking me
home, darling? I feel like the devil/'

She looked very pale and" I noticed small beads of perspiration
on her forehead.

Back at the hotel she said, "Til take some aspirin and feel
better in the morning."

She went to sleep in my arms, but twice during the night I

[ 255 ]

was wakened by the faint light from the bathroom and found her
there. The second time she was wet with perspiration and shaking
violently.

She said, *T think you'd better send for the doctor. I don't
know what's the matter with me. It's Doctor Wyndham. YouTI
find his telephone number on a card in the inside flap of my
handbag. . . , No, bring it to me. Ill find it.'*

I put her back to bed, covered her, and gave her the handbag.
Her hands shook so violently that she could scarcely open it,
but, fumbling, she found the card at last and gave it to me. She
said, "Tell him I'm having one of my attacks . . . that it's serious
. . . hell understand . . . for God's sake to come at once."

It was a country hotel with no telephone in the room and I
was forced to go below stairs to the office. It was four in the
morning and there was no one on duty> and it took me what
seemed an endless time, first to discover how the country tele-
phone worked, and then to rouse the operator at the exchange.
Then after a long wait a sleepy voice answered me at the other
end of the wire. It was Doctor Wyndham himself.

I tried to explain myself and give him Mary's urgent message,
but he seemed to understand at once and to find nothing ex-
traordinary in the situation. He seemed to know what was meant
by "one of my attacks."

"Tell her," he said, "that 111 be over at once ... as soon as I
can."

By now I was terrified, and the fear increased when as I ap-
proached the door of our room I could hear the sound of Mary's
groaning. As I entered the door she fell silent and turned toward
me, and as she did so I saw that the pillow was covered with
lipstick and what I suspected were teeth marks. I sat down beside
her and began stroking her damp hair saying, "What is it, darling?
Isn't there something I can do?"

With what appeared to be a great effort she said, "There isn't
anything until the doctor comes. Just hold my hand . . . like that.
It makes it easier."

"What is it?" I asked, gently enough.

[256 ]

Again with a great effort slie said, "It's something that goes
wrong with my insides. You wouldn't understand. The doctor
knows about it."

Then she began to cry, shaking violently like a small child
and burying her head in the crook of my arm. As before on
that night at Lexington we came very near to each other. Out-
side the sky began to turn gray and then pink, and I had that
strange feeling, which some people have in time of crisis, of
clairvoyance and utter disaster. Somehow I knew that this was
the end of something . . * not death . . . but of some part of my
life and of hers. It was almost a physical thing, as if I saw not
with my eyes alone or with my mind but with the whole of me.
And I was afraid suddenly with a fear that was only the same
emotion I had experienced that night in Lexington but greatly
heightened and touched by a sense of dread, of something which
I was about to discover, which lay just a little way ahead of me.

There was something horrible and almost obscene in the sight
of her suffering, as if there were a quality of the unnatural about
it. At moments she seemed unable any longer to control herself
and cried out, and once when I laid my hand on her thigh, she
thrust it away fiercely as if it had burned her, saying, "Please! . . .
Please, don't touch me! It's agony!" I had had little experience
with physical suffering in others and certainly I had never
witnessed anything like this. At moments it seemed impossible
for anyone to suffer as acutely and still survive.

And after what seemed an eternity, while Mary cried and
thrust her body, arched and convulsive with suffering, away
from me, I heard the sound of a car on the silent village street.
It pulled up to the hotel and stopped, and bending down to
kiss her forehead, I said, "It's the doctor, darling. I'll go and
bring him up."

As I stood up she reached out and, seizing my hand, kissed it.
This was the last action in the world I would have expected of
her, and I freed my hand and kissed her again and she whispered,
"I want to be alone with the doctor.**

"Yes, darling/*

[ 257 ]

I met the doctor in the downstairs hall, still in my pajamas
and dressing gown. He was a tall thin man of about sixty with
a gentle distinguished pleasant face and wore very clear rimless
glasses. I introduced myself and we shook hands and I said,
"She's suffering a great deaL Tm frightened about her." But he
seemed strangely quiet about it. He said, "I think I know what
is the matter. Shell be all right again in a little while. I'll go
right up to her/*

He left me and hurried up the stairs, and for a while I stood
looking out of the window into the street. There was nothing to
see but an old brick house and a filling station and some trees,
yet today I know exactly how it looks even to the streaks of rust
that ran down from the roof across the white face of the filling
station. The sense of something coming to an end was still with
me and I thought, for no apparent reason at all, "What do I do
now? Where do I go?" It was not death, either Mary's or my
own, which concerned me, for as I have grown older death has
come to mean less and less.

I found myself thinking, 'Why am I here in this little Virginia
town amongst strangers? How did I come here? What has hap-
pened to me?" and for a moment the whole of the affair with
Mary seemed completely unreal as if it were something I had
dreamed, and I saw myself as if I had been slightly insane for
many weeks and had recovered my sanity. All the weeks and
months when nothing had existed for me but Mary and the emo-
tions and sensuality which centered in her seemed distant and
strange. The memory of it was like something emerging, vague
and distorted, in a fog. And then I heard someone at the hotel
desk behind me and saw the old man who had been there the
afternoon before.

I said, "My wife was taken ill. Doctor Wyndham is with her
now."

He looked at me with a rather gentle smile as if he thought,
"Another one of those things among the people who come down
here!" as if I were a complete foreigner.

Tm sorry to hear that," he said. "I'm sure it will turn out all

[258 ]

right" Then he added, "The cook is here. Perhaps you'd like a
cup of coffee/*

I thanked him and he led me into the plain empty dining room
and pulled out a chair at a table and went into the kitchen, re-
turning in a moment with a cup and a small enameled coffee pot.

"It's fresh made/* he said. "Would you like some eggs or some-
thing with it?"

I thanked him and said I wasn't hungry. "When the doctor
comes down, tell him I'm in here/'

'Til tell him," said the old man, and I had a feeling that, for
all his kindness, he wished to wash his hands of me, of Maiy,
of all people like us.

I had finished the coffee when I saw the doctor, followed by
the old man, coming in the door of the dining room. The old
man went to fetch another cup, and the doctor, still carrying his
little medicine case, came over and said to me, "She'll be all
right now in a little while ... as right as ever."

"What about some coffee?" I asked.

"Yes," said the doctor and sat down.

"What is it with her?" I asked.

The doctor took out a cigarette. He seemed to be neither per-
turbed nor in a hurry. "I'm coming to that," he said. "In one
sense it's nothing to worry about. In another it's terrible." He
lighted the cigarette and lifted bis coffee cup. I liked him. He
seemed calm and gentle with his clear blue eyes, and very re-
assuring.

He said, "You see, I like horses. That's why I'm down here.
I don't really practice any longer . . . just now and then for
friends like Mary. It's a good life . . . farming, horses, just
enough doctoring to keep my hand in/*

I wanted him to get to the point, but I was aware that trying
to hurry so calm a man would lead nowhere.

He said, "I meet all kinds of people . . . any doctor does . . .
but I get more than the average share of people with a lot of
money who somehow get lost along the way. Maybe it's be-
cause they never really know where they're going or don't care

[ 259 ]

much whether they go one way or another. , * . This coffee is
very good. The Inn's not a bad place really/*

Hoping to lead him to the point I said, "It was very good o
you to come out at such an ungodly hour."

"That's all right/" he said. Tm fond of Mary. She's one of
the ones who got lost along the road. By the way, she wanted
me to tell you something. Maybe you know it already. It's hard
to believe that you don't, but she is sure you don't/' He put
down his coffee cup and said, "You know, she's a drug addict.
There wasn't anything wrong with her but that she ran out of
drugs. She was expecting it by post three or four days ago
and it didn't arrive. You see, that woman Nicole didn't send the
stuff and she ran out of it."

So that was why the letter at the post office was so important.
For a moment I just sat there trying to pull myself together in
order to make some coherent or sensible remark. Somehow the
sense of doom I had felt was now all connected.

All I could think to say was, "How did she ever get started
on that?"

He went on calmly talking as if what he had told me was no
more startling than the news that Mary was suffering from
indigestion.

"She never talks much about it I think it began in Italy so
far as I can make out, a long time ago. You see, this happened
once before, so when you. called I knew what was the matter.
I've taken care of her for the moment. She'll be all right very
quickly." He looked at me sharply. "It's a frightening thing,
isn't it? ... I mean the suffering. I don't suppose anyone can
quite describe it. When they're in that condition it's as if the
whole of the body is a mass of exposed nerves. The inquisition,
the Nazis never thought up any torture quite like it/'

I still could find nothing to say and he continued, Tm sur-
prised you didn't know it already, but Mary said she was sure
you had no suspicion. I suppose someone would have to know
the signs very well the little scars, the way she would seem
very tired one moment and then disappear for a little while and

[ 260 ]

return gay and full of vitality, the look in the eyes. And of course
she never drinks anything stronger than sherry.'*

It all fitted . . . too well. I had noticed these things without
noticing them, perhaps because I did not understand their sig-
nificance, because I was just too damned dumb and inexperi-
enced.

The doctor went on calmly drinking his coffee and presently
in a voice which did not sound to me like my own, I asked, "Can't
anything be done about it?"

"It might be possible to cure her perhaps for good, perhaps
not. I don't think she wants to be cured. That is what is difficult
in such cases. It all begins in the first place through despair, and
usually they're afraid to go back and face that despair. Nearly
always they break down again. You see, Mary is very unstable
psychologically. It's all very complex and I don't pretend to know
the reasons."

Outside it was now quite light and the morning sun was
coming in at the windows. I saw people begin to appear in the
little village street. The man at the filling station opposite
unlocked the door and came out to fill a car with gasoline. But
despite the sunlight everything was gray for me, as if the whole
scene was enveloped by a fog which penetrated even the bare
little dining room.

The doctor said, "All this, of course, is none of my business and
there's no bloody reason why I should give anybody advice except
that none of us can help it. I don't know who you are or anything
about what goes on between you and Mary, but if I were you
I'd break it up. Nothing good can come of it. It can only get
worse and it might end in tragedy."

"What does Mary think?"

T[ don't know. I didn't ask her. It's not only the drugs, you
know. It's other things. It may be that you've gotten into some-
thing you don't understand at all." He stood up suddenly. "And
now I'm going to shut up ... tight. I'm going to take Mary back
to New York this afternoon. I'll drive her to Washington and go

[ 261 ]

from there on the train. She ought to be in a hospital of some
kind for a time . . . you know, a private sort of place."

"I could take her/* I said quickly.

"No. You wouldn't know the right persons to see or the right
place to take her. You see, there's a whole secret inside world
that exists for people like Mary. You have to have the key.
Besides, she doesn't want you to go with her. She didn't even
want to see you, but I didn't see how that could be avoided. I
I were you Td Just pack up and clear out ... at least for the
moment. Mary knows 111 take care of her. I've known her well for
twenty years. If you stay around under the circumstances it
will only agitate her and make things worse. I'll be coming back
in an hour ... as soon as I've packed up. You'd better go sep-
arately. Just hire a car and disappear." Then he picked up his
little bag and put one hand on my shoulder and said, "Sorry,
old man."

He turned away to go and I felt tears coming into my eyes
in spite of everything ... or because of everything. And sud-
denly he said, "Perhaps you've gotten in too deep . . . where you
don't belong. If you go quickly it will be better for Mary and
everyone."

I managed to say, "Thank you ? Doctor," and suddenly he was
gone.

The hardest thing was to get up the stairs and into the room
again. I think it was because I was going up the stairs to find
a different person from the one I had left a little while before
and because somehow the shame of the whole thing had touched
me as well. I was ashamed to see Mary. And yet I loved her
still, as much as before. But something curious had happened
to that love. The elements of it had become precipitated and
separate. The sensuality which I know now was the core of that
love had become a separate thing, something to be practiced
coldly and with calculation. I saw it clearly now. I was not
properly a lover but a voluptuary; which I suppose is what
happens to men of my age who lose their heads. Mary had given
me something I had never known before and possibly would never
know again, but I never again would be free from the thought

[ 262 ]

and the memory of it. Perhaps the tragedy was that the knowl-
edge and the experience had come too late.

When I came into the room Mary was lying quite still and
calm. She said, "Dick Wyndham told you?"

I came and sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, but
in an odd way it was a different hand from the one I had held a
little while before as we waited for the doctor to arrive, I felt
no emotion of any kind but only a curious shocked coldness.

"Yes," I said.

She looked away from me rather like a shamed child. Tin
sorry."

"It's aH right," I said.

"He told you he's taking me back to New York?"

"Yes."

"I don't want you to come. When I'm straightened out a bit
we can get together again."

"Yes."

"You want it, don't you?"

"Of course, my dear."

"It'll be different . . . your knowing. It won't be the same ever
again."

"Yes." And then I lied, "It doesn't change anything really."

"Not really, I suppose." She drew her hand away and raised
herself on her elbows. "Now get yourself packed up. I'm to be
ready to go in an hour or two. You'd better be gone when the
doctor comes back."

I dressed and packed quickly without a shower, without even
shaving, partly I know now, because I did not want to look myself
in the eyes again in the mirror. I had had too much of that.

When I came back into the room she was up wearing a dressing
gown and packing her own things. She said, "Of course, you
know, this is all Nicole's fault."

"Yes."

"She did it once before out of jealousy."

When I had finished packing and closed my bag she came
across the room and put her arms about me, laying her head
against my chest, and at the contact of her body the old fierce

[ 263 ]

desire returned and more acutely than before I understood the
fashion in which the elements of the whole affair had been
precipitated. This was my body over which neither my mind nor
its reason had any control. I was ready to begin all over again,
at once.

"No," she said softly. "Not now. It will be all the better when
we see each other again." A faint sigh escaped from her, and
with her face still buried on .my chest she said in a low voice,
Tve done a dirty thing to you. Have you forgiven me?"

"There's nothing to forgive."

"Good-by then for now. Ill write you at once. Kiss me."

I kissed her and it was exactly as before and I knew then that
I could never give her up, that I would come back again and
again, for I had been corrupted. And I understood everything
about Nicole and the peculiar relationship between her and
Mary, It was Nicole who got her the stuff. That was why Nicole
could never be sent away for good.

The sense of doom, of unreality, of a gray fog which seemed
to envelop everything, remained with me during the whole of the
trip home. I had no other thoughts but those which concerned
Mary and myself, and once or twice it occurred to me that it
might have been better if everything had ended cleanly in death
without my ever having known. What had happened was a kind
of death without any of the finality to which one must become
reconciled or perish. What was to happen now? What would it be
like when I returned to her? There began to arise in my mind
every sort of suspicion as to what Mary's life had been in the past,
and I kept hearing the voice of the man called Basil "Why have
you become so nasty nice after taking on everybody, even
jockeys?" I saw myself as a fool and a naive fool, so that I found
myself actually blushing. Perhaps the whole thing had been on
my side merely an illusion. Perhaps I had been merely used as a
convenience the nearest man at hand.

What troubled me most was the consideration of what it

[264 ]

would be like when I returned to her. Very likely it would become
no more than a sensual adventure now that the curious precipita-
tion into elements had occurred in my mind. I could not forget
what the kindly doctor had said, "I do not think that she wants
to be cured/*

Mechanically I had headed for home, why I do not know,
except that it seemed the only place to go. I was returning then,
exactly as Enid had planned it, exactly as the sob sisters had
advised her I would do in their columns. Maybe, after all, they
were right about most men and what was I but Mr. Smith, having
his fling as middle age approached, believing that this had never
happened before to any other man? Perhaps I was just another of
the myriad Mr. Smiths who should have had all this experience
and knowledge in my twenties when it was proper and natural
for a man to have it, and was trying now to make up for lost time
when it was too late.

I could of course throw everything out of the window and
clear out for good to join Mary, but I knew that this was not
what Mary wanted and I saw clearly enough even through the
gray fog where such an action would lead. We would wander
about here and there and it could never be the same again, and
whatever there was of stability in me would presently deteriorate
and at last disappear. I took too easily to drink. Why should not
that point arise at which I too began to take drugs? But despite
seeing all this clearly, through the fog, I could not help thinking,
'Why not? Maybe thafs die best solution." The prospect of
going back to Oakdale to disappear once more into the curious
kind of conforming anonymity which existed there seemed
intolerable.

I took a taxi from the airfield. I had not troubled to send Enid
a wire that I would be home earlier than I expected. I had not
thought of it at all. And now I would arrive home about five in
the evening as a surprise. The thought occurred to me that this
was frequently the fashion in which men discovered the infidelity
of their wives, but the idea that I might find Enid with a man
seemed only ludicrous. Certainly that was not what she wanted.

[265]

And of course I found no man. I found Enid playing bridge on
the veranda with three women. As she saw me emerge from the
taxi she put down her cards and came to meet me on the terrace
in full sight of the women crying, "Darling, what a surprise!"
and before I knew what was happening she had kissed me vio-
lently on the lips and mechanically I had put my arm about her
something which had not happened in months.

I said, again mechanically, "I got through things sooner than
I expected," and heard the sentence echoing in my brain as if
it were an ironic comment on the whole of the situation. Then the
women called out greetings to me and I knew what they were
thinking. They were thinking, "He's come back. Enid was right!
They all come back in the endP And they were speculating
desperately as to what had happened and about what went on
between Mary and me and they would be itching to get home
and telephone all their friends. Enid's gesture had covered
everything.

I stopped by the bridge table for a moment, acting and talk-
ing as if nothing whatever had happened, and then went up to
my room followed by the red setter who could not get enough
of me, and when I sat on the bed he came over, jumped up, and
licked my face. I rubbed his ears and lay down, and presently
without being aware of it I fell asleep. I had not slept in thirty-
six hours.

It was dark when I wakened and hazily everything came back
to me and the pain seemed worse, and now, rested, I wanted
to leave at once and go back to Mary. Nothing else mattered.
But I did not know where to find her in "that private secret world
made for such people." All the unsatisfied desire returned to me
and I saw again, with that new understanding, how much of the
attraction had been pure sensuality* Again it was my body which
wanted to return again and again. It was not really me. My
body, my nerves, my sensuality had taken over, then dominated
me as the drugs dominated Mary. Even now, here on this island,
my body, dominating, cries out in anguish to return. But there
is no means of return. I must satisfy it as best I can, to be rid of it

t 266 ]

I went downstairs at last, meaning to take out the car and
drive off. I had no objective. I would just drive anywhere at all.
And just as I was escaping I heard Enid's voice saying, "Darling,
I've kept your supper hot. If s in the oven/*

I said, "Thanks. I don't want anything/*

She was quite near me now and she said, "If there's anything
I can do to help, let me know. I want to help/*

I was astonished by the speech but more astonished by the
obvious air of sincerity. It was one of the few times in all our
life together that she had, I felt, meant what she said. I really
think that she meant it all. If things had been different she might
have won out for good then and there. I might have gone back
and begun all over again and finished out my life in the pattern
of Oakdale. But there was too much in the past and I was too
wary. I had been betrayed too many times and was unwilling
to be trapped and betrayed again into that falsity, that spurious
intensity which long ago had become unendurable. Too many
memories rushed through my brain.

I was sorry for her, genuinely so, but I said, "Thanks, Enid.
I'm just going out to get some air. I'll probably be home early /'

She knew that something had happened although she could
not in the wildest stretch of her imagination have divined what
it was. She hoped, of course, that it was all over between Mary
and me, but I think also that she understood in that moment
that even if I returned physically to spend the rest of my life
in the house with her and the children she had lost me forever.

The next day I went to the office and went through the motions
of picking up the loose ends of my business. I was more efficient
than usual and demanded perfection from my secretary and the
file clerks. And at four I left and stopped by the hotel bar to
have a drink, and by the looks on the faces of my friends I
knew that the three bridge-playing women had done their work
well and the news had spread that I had come back for good,
although how they suspected or knew that something serious
had happened I cannot even today understand. I think there was
sympathy in the faces of some of my friends. They had looked

[ 267 ]

on me as a wild devil and envied me, and now it was over and
I was back in the fold again.

It was after six when I arrived home and I found the letter
from Mary. She ha"d never written me at home before. The most
had been a telegram judiciously worded and sent to my office.
Enid, I doubt, could possibly have known her handwriting, but
she had left the letter lying on the bed in my room, as if she had
wanted to give it an added and urgent importance. My hands
shook as I tore it open, and all the desire to be with Mary came
rushing back in a great and submerging wave. The emotion w,as
a purely sensual one.

This is what I read:

My Darling:

This is a line to say good-by. I'm going away tonight and
I'm not coming back for a long time. Very likely I shall never
go back again to the old house that was the only place which
ever seemed like home. I shan't see you again.

It hurts me to write this, but there are so many reasons so
many that you know nothing about, even beyond what you dis-
covered in Virginia. It was all wrong from the beginning, you
understand, and I knew that it was all wrong. That's what made
it the worse and the more wicked on my part, for I could have
stopped it at one point or I could never have begun it all. There
has been something wrong about me since the very beginning,
something which was evil and coirupt, and I can't begin to tell
you when it hegan or why it ever existed. It began when I was
quite young and the world in which I was brought up didn't
help it much, and when I married it was . . . like touching off
an explosion. It is something which I cannot control and long
ago I gave up trying to control it.

It is like tearing my heart out to write you this because I
really loved you. and still love you, darling. You might once
have been the means of my salvation, but it's too late for that.
Too much had happened long before we ever met that day on
the road. It's as if I were two people, one of whom is my enemy
whom I cannot trust, who betrays me, who kidnaps me, and
does with me as he pleases and then goes away leaving me spent

[ 268 ]

and wretched and shamed and with no peace. I know by now
that my enemy will always come back when I am not on my
guard and claim me and it will begin all over again. You were
not the first man in my life nor the second or the third. There
have been many ... so many that when I am tired I sometimes
cannot remember them all. What the man shouted at me on the
veranda in Kentucky was true. There have been all kinds of
men, yes, even a jockey whom he knew about.

I used to come back home to the big old house for a rest,
because for a little time I could escape and because such things
were very difficult there. But it happened even there, swiftly
and fiercely, never for long, but it happened as if I were nothing
but an instrument for my own destruction. It happened with
men that you perhaps know. Naming them would do no good.
It would only make things worse. It happened there first many
years ago with the golf instructor at the club. I cannot even
remember his name. So I am a monster and that is how I want
you to think of me, always.

It was an evil chance that you picked me up on the day that
I had the accident on the road. The thing was coming on again
and what happened might have happened with any man who
came along at that moment, but with you the worst of all things
happened, I saw suddenly that you looked very like my father
and after that I no longer had any control. I had to do what I
did. You understand that I came back willingly every year from
Europe. I kept the house exactly as it was because of him. And
now I am free of the place. I need never come back again.
Something has happened to me and I think you are the one
who has set me free because you gave me what no other was
ever able to give and now I needn't ever see the house again.
They can tear it down. They can burn it. It can rot away. I am
free. And it was you who set me free although you knew
nothing of what you were doing.

But I loved you for yourself as well, perhaps more than I
have ever loved anyone. Why? Because you seemed decent and
clean and you were such an innocent when you came to me.
You were all the things I had not known for so long, all the
things indeed which I have never known and never experienced
with any man. You needn't be ashamed of your innocence. You

[ 269 ]

were the most wonderful lover I have ever known and I do not
speak without experience. Giving you up forever is the hardest
thing I have ever done, but it must be done. If it went on it
could only progress into corruption because I am at heart cor-
rupt and long since beyond salvation or redemption. I only hope
that I have not already corrupted you beyond saving.

Oh ? darling, I am so confused, so wretched, so frightened.
When I cried out that night that I was tired, it was a cry from
the heart, from beyond the grave. I am tired of struggling, tired
of forever failing myself and everyone else. For a time you lifted
me above all of that, but it could not last because I am what
I am.

You will not see me again, even if you tried to follow me.
I would not see you even if I had to destroy myself to prevent
it ... and that would be much easier than you think. I go to
sleep every night not caring in the least whether I waken in the
morning. I am only afraid of physical suffering. You must have
seen what a coward I was that night in Virginia. Perhaps if that
had not happened it might have gone on a little longer . . . but
after that night I knew that it would never be the same again
that something was changed and that from then on everything
would only become progressively more evil and more corrupt.
Why do I know this? Because that same knowledge all happened
to me once before in Italy when I was much younger. Only then
it was myself who was the innocent and the corrupted. That
is how I came to begin the whole business of taking drugs. That
time I was not the corrupter but the corrupted.

Somewhere in a book I once read a quotation which I memo-
rized and have never forgotten. It was written in French and runs-
thus: "Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose; le supplice
propre au damne est le progres infini dans le vice et le crime*
?dme /endurcissant? se depravant toufours, tfenfongant neces-
scdrement dans le mal de la minute en progression g&ometrique
pendant T6terntt6"

It is a pity that you do not understand French, for it is very
terrible and very beautiful in French. I will try to translate it for
you, badly. It runs something like this, "In the course of damna-
tion the fire is the least thing; the real punishment of the damned
is the infinitely slow progression into vice and crime, in which

[270 ]

the spirit grows constantly more brutish, more hardened, con-
stantly more depraved, losing itself through necessity again and
again in the transient evil of the moment, in a geometric pro-
gression throughout eternity."

Do you understand what that means? No one who is not
damned can really understand it, hut perhaps after what has
happened between us you are enough damned to fathom a little
its meaning.

When we were together I tried not to tell you anything, to
let you see anything, even the smallest thing, and that was all
right so long as we loved each other in a world in which no one
else existed or came near us. Perhaps if we had gone on as we
began, in that old house, I might have managed it ... I mean
loving you without corrupting you too much. I don't know why
I have written what I have just written because it could never
have gone on like that and because what I have written is not
true. It is only that while we were together I tried perpetually to
deceive myself as well as you, and out of that deception no good
could ever come.

The terrible thing is that I cannot see the end or indeed any
end. I am alone and each year I grow a little older and a little
more desperate. What happened between us was a blessed
respite which I knew always in my heart could not last.

I could not have written you thus if I were not at heart an
honest woman and a fairly intelligent one. I could not have
written you as I am doing if I had not loved you and, God
help me, did not stnl love you. I am writing you this because
I want you to understand, if only a little, that I am both better
and worse than I must have seemed to you.

So I am going away. Do not try to find me. Remember or
forget me whatever is easiest for you and best. I ask you only
to remember one thing that you were not like all the others.
The beginning perhaps was the same and then something hap-
pened. It was not like anything that ever happened before. I
loved you. That is what made it different. And I shall be forever
grateful to you because for a little time I came alive. For a
little time everything came together into a- pattern that might
once have saved me. And then I discovered that it was too late
for salvation.

[271 I

I shall go on, distracting myself. I shall perhaps at times find
life possible and I shall even know the fierce, evil, physical
pleasure of the act that has been my damnation . . . the act
alone! Do you know how terrible that can be, how vicious and
degrading and calloused? And for a woman it is so much worse.

I could not debase myself more than I have done in this letter,
and somehow the lacerating confession has made me for a little
time at least feel cleaner, as if I had atoned and been absolved.
But perhaps I am only a fool and fancy that what you gave me
was more than the others gave and that I only think you are
different and that what you gave me was different. When I
kissed your hand that night I was trying to say in a futile mean-
ingless gesture what I have written here ... all of it. You know
that I am a proud woman and a fiercely independent one and
that such a gesture could only have come from the depths of
my heart out of the most profound gratitude and emotion.

And so good-by. I shall be all right. I hope you will be. I
think everything has changed for you. I know it, for I watched
it happen without your ever knowing. I was aware of what was
happening. You see, darling, there are so many things I know
that you never knew and may never know. I think I must have
been born knowing them. It made me a lonely young girl and
later a lonely woman. Good-by again . . . and God bless you.

Mary

X/V The Jungle

I AM COMING NEAR THE END OF THE BECOBD WITH A ITEEL-

ing that there must be some real and definitive end, like the
period at the end of a sentence, both to the record and the sub-
stance out of which it has come. Setting all this down has been
at tomes an agony. At other times the narrative seems to have run
along easily, telling itself like a newborn brook flowing from a
spring. But out of it has come a kind of satisfaction, even perhaps,
in the sense of eternity, a kind of purification and the realization
of a purpose, without which my life would have remained

[ 272 ]

incomplete and even confused and meaningless. I have begun
to feel a sort of peace, the kind of peace which a great writer
or sculptor or painter or architect or engineer must feel when
a given objective of creation is realized and achieved. There is
blended with it a feeling of self-respect such as I have never
known before, of having had a purpose and carried it through.
Whatever happens now I have at least done something.

I have purged myself, awkwardly, by a great effort, with all
the discomfort and miseries of a difficult gestation, for, not being
skilled and experienced as a writer and in the whole business of
putting into words that are understandable the thought and
emotions and intuitions of this thing called my body, I have been
called upon to exercise vast powers of will and determination.
Yet in the exercise of those powers, in the very discipline in-
volved I have achieved satisfaction and even peace. Despite
the frustrations, the birth pangs, the desperate effort to see
things clearly and honestly, I shall be sorry when there is no
more to write. I am even a little afraid of that moment. It is, I
think, a terror of becoming lost all over again.

When it is finished what shall I do then with my time, with
my interests, with my thoughts? I am beginning to understand
that I shall never turn back, that I shall never see Oakdale again
or Enid or the old life since it would be impossible for me ever
again to be a part of all those dead things. I have tried earnestly
to set down in honesty what I am and why I am what I am.
Perhaps it is a task too complicated, too complex, too difficult
for any man. Alone here in the jungle I have put upon paper
things I have never told any man, things which it would be quite
impossible to tell, no matter how earnestly I might wish to do so.
At moments, alone in the jungle, I have felt myself blushing. And
so I have done a "Self-portrait of the Artist."

There is little left to tell except the end and, of course, I shall
not be here to set that down, to write the postscript of what may
seem a trivial and tormented existence!

After the break-up with Mary I lived for a time in what might
be described best perhaps as a state of suspended animation in

f 273 ]

which I had neither will nor purpose, in which nothing that
happened had any interest or value. Twice I tried to break
through to her. Once a letter was returned marked "address
unknown.'* The other letter was never answered. Once I planned
again in detail the perfect means of destroying Enid. All three
impulses, I know, were dictated by a single force that of sen-
suality, of wanting passionately to experience again and indeed
forever merely the sensual satisfaction which was forever linked
to Mary. How often is that pure sensuality confused with love,
yet it is nevertheless an integral and indispensable part of any
complete and satisfactory love. In that sensuality my own body
was regenerated and made younger. It became for a time some-
thing apart from me, a kind of instrument which I myself admired
and even glorified, so that the sight of it, seen naked accidentally
in a mirror, roused in me an emotion of gratitude and admiration.
Perhaps that is the way all of us should feel toward our bodies
if we were honest and truly decent. For a time, even though it may
have been an illusion (and that I shall never know), I did expe-
rience what might be called by the French designation amour,
complete and liberating and satisfactory. In that, even though
it may have been an illusion, I was more fortunate than most
men who rarely even approach such an experience.

In that period of suspended animation I seemed to have
acquired a curious gentleness, and save for the two letters to
Mary and the morbid planning of Enid's destruction, things went
better in my relationship with Enid. At least I was not consciously
cruel to her. I accepted her nonsense, her complacency, her
power of pretending, her devastating emptiness and superficiality,
or perhaps I ignored it because it no longer had the power to
touch me. I think this was one of the happiest periods of her
life because the pattern which she had set up for herself became
for a little time to have some semblance of reality. I was docile
because I did not really care about anything and so was no longer
annoyed by her lack of honesty and her make-believe. I did not
strike back. I no longer even felt any revulsion.

I found that I slept a great deal, partly because it provided

[ 274 ]

the escape of a Tittle death*' and partly because there was no
reason for waking, having a shower, and starting a new day.

And then came the unexpected and unplanned opportunity
provided by a war of which, until then, I had taken little notice.
They needed "businessmen," They needed "administrators" and
"executives/* and so they took me, and almost at once they forgot
the whole purpose of taking me by sending me out here to sit
on this evil and lovely and uncomfortable island where Enid
writes to me as if our life together had always been a satisfactory
and even a happy one, as if nothing at all had ever happened. The
erring husband had come home, exactly as the advisors to the
lovelorn had predicted.

Even the final, savage, heroic quarrel which occurred the day
before I left, in which I said cruel and vicious things I never said
before and, whatever- happens, will never say again because
they hurt me far more than they hurt Enid, has made no differ-
ence. She "forgave" me at once even though I had told her that
she was a humbug and worse than a liar because she lived a lie
and was utterly detestable to any decent man. Afterward I went
outside into the darkness and was sick in the rose garden. But
it was all for nothing. She did not even know what I was talking
about. What happens to her or to me is of little importance. The
tragedy is that there are so many like her. That I am nowhere
near her, that she goes through day after day, week after week,
without ever seeing me, is of no importance. In the eyes of the
world and in so far as she is concerned I have been recaptured
and everything is all right again. The letters she writes me, like
the one about cutting down the hedge and her difficulties with
Ronnie, my boy, are dull and small-minded but illuminated by
a sense of triumph. I do not think it would matter at all to her
if I died or were killed. For a time it would bring her a sense
of importance in the community. Materially she is well-off. She
would be a "war widow" whose husband had died, one way or
another, for his country. She can, barring utter economic collapse
of a whole great nation, keep her automobile, her refrigerator,
her neo-Georgian house, her plumbing. She can send the children

[ 275 ]

off to college., possibly to waste four years of their lives, to return
as empty and as uneducated as Enid and I returned a generation
earlier. She might conceivably marry again an older man less
eccentric and peculiar and more comfortable than I have ever
been, a man who fitted the pattern of her world and culture, a
man who had never dared to look at himself, his wife, or the
world in which he lives.

There is a double and complicated irony in the sense of
triumph I find in Enid's letters. She has never understood that
in the very moment I came back to her she had really lost me for-
ever. It did not matter whether I was living in the same house or
separated by half the earth, as we actually are. She had lost me.
I was simply not there at all whether my body was in Oakdale
or in the South Pacific. I suppose I am not alone in such an
escape. There must be others. Only I have written it all down.

Last night the Sergeant came in again for some gin rummy.
He seemed a little more calm than he had been in the past. It
may be that he is becoming worn down by monotony and despair.
I had to tell him that there was still no news regarding the
possibility of leave and he took it not too badly.

I think I shall miss him, or rather perhaps the complete extro-
vert stability which he represents. He has a kind of animal
warmth and vitality which somehow rubs off on you when he
has been around for a little time. Most of all, I think, it is because
we are friends. I think of him as a friend, even when I attempt
to analyze why this is so ... more a friend perhaps than any
man I have ever known. Why? Perhaps because we do not
question each other or our motives or thoughts, because each
gives the other what it is he wants and needs.

A friend is a very difficult thing to analyze. "Friend" is a
word which is used carelessly and often enough without mean-
ing. When I sit down and try to list my friends, the number
emerges surprisingly small. Mere community of interests is not
enough. There is a certain give-and-take, a certain mutual com-

[ 276 ]

pensation which is not easy to define, since more often than not
it arises from impulse and intuition beyond the realm of the
conscious. I suppose you get what you give, and my own life
has been perhaps crippled and limited because I did not give
enough and so got back little. Sometimes I think that in this
hurried mechanical world in which we live there is too little time
not only to live decently and richly but even to maintain and
cultivate the thing known as a friend.

I think the Sergeant and I would each go to any length to do
a service for the other. Sometimes I think that perhaps we could
have a very satisfactory existence for the rest of our lives, merely
beachcombing together until at last one of us dies. We have
never discussed any of this. I could not bring myself to do it and in
any case such a discussion would scare him to death. At the root
of everything perhaps lies on my side the realization that in him
I have met an honest man.

He won all evening at rummy and went away in high spirits,
I heard him whistling as he crossed the sand in the moonlight
to his own hut, and it occurred to me that not only was he an
honest man but a free man and that he would never do a nasty
thing. That is the reason he cannot understand a specimen like
Homer, the wool-hat. That is the reason why r out of sheer moral
indignation and frustration, he gives Homer a "going-over." In
him and his kind perhaps lies the salvation of the world, not in
science or "liberalism" or do-gooding or sentimentality or respect-
ability or politics or womb-to-tomb philosophies, but in primitive
virtues like simplicity and honesty and decency*

The sound of his whistling has died away in the moonlight,
and back at my battered typewriter I find that, for me, with all
my limitations and all my inhibition.^ I have nothing more to
write. I am sitting here fumbling with the keys, obsessed by a
strange feeling of emptiness. Perhaps it is because there is no
more to tell. I am purged and clean but empty.

The quick red fox jumps over the . . . Somebody is shooting
again. Probably that noble 'underprivileged" specimen Homer . , .

[ 277 ]

I shall have to go and see what the rumpus is about. I go empty
and finished but clean. . . .

None: That is the way the manuscript ended and it is perhaps
as good as any other ending. It just may be that there is a kind
of symbolism in the fact that middle-class "Mr. Smith/* with all
his limitations, his weaknesses, his aspirations, was destroyed by
Homer, the wool-hat Homer, one of the swarming ever-increas-
ing "underprivileged/*

[ 278 ]

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